The purpose of this unique book is to provide police officers and administrators with a simple and effective handbook to improve the safety of police employees. It is research-based and uses the most up-to-date statistics from the Department of Justice, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, and the Uniform Crime Report. The first chapter of this book contains a complete list of actual cases of officer deaths during 2010. This list provides an overview of how officers are dying in the line of duty. After a problem is identified and discussed in one chapter, the next chapter details strategies that can be implemented to reduce injury and death by employees. Additional topics include specific problems including traffic fatalities, assaults on officers, police homicides, physical health, psychological health, moonlighting, shift work, substance abuse, heart disease, nutrition, suicide, and family issues. The importance of comprehensive wellness programs, and the interconnectedness of employee morale with health and safety are examined. This book has detailed the true causes of Job-related police officer injury and death. It has also identified effective strategies that police personnel at all levels can do to prevent these tragedies from continuing to occur. These recommended strategies will prove useful for officers and administrators alike.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports Section selected and analyzed 51 incidents of police officer killings in order to evaluate the psychology of the offender, the behavior of the police officer, and circumstances in which the police officer lost his or her life. The study was conducted over a 3-year period; the 51 incidents resulted in the death of 54 police officers and involved 50 offenders. Results demonstrated that, while no single offender profile could be established, most killers of police officers had been diagnosed as having some type of personality disorder. Behavioral descriptors of victims were frequently similar in that they were good-natured and more conservative than their fellow officers in the use of physical force. The incidents themselves revealed that killings were often facilitated by some type of procedural miscue (e.g., improper approach to a vehicle). Type of assignment, circumstances at the scene of an encounter, weapons involved, and the environment in which events occurred all played a role in the preponderance of police officer deaths in the South. The report presents extensive information on the victims, offenders, and incidents studied. It identifies personality types of offenders, provides guidance on how individuals of a given personality type interact with authority figures, and offers approaches to interrogation. The report also points out specific areas where law enforcement training and procedures may be improved. Appendixes contain the study methodology and a description of personality types.

This book is designed to help law enforcement professionals overcome the internal assaults they experience both personally and organizationally over the course of their careers. These assaults can transform idealistic and committed officers into angry, cynical individuals, leading to significant problems in both their personal and professional lives.

In Force Under Pressure, Dr. Lawrence Blum, who has devoted his life's work to the survival and wellness of "those who serve," describes the sources of danger, injuries, and victory to police officers in a down-to-earth, readable style. Blum argues that there are missing "ingredients" in the training and socialization of police officers. These ingredients include techniques and tools to condition the officer's decision-making and concentration during conditions of emergency; internal controls necessary to maintain the will to survive; and aids that will prevent officers being defeated by any threat. Distressing and/or disturbing physical and psychological reactions are common in a police officer's workday, and the officer must be prepared for them. Blum's work has uncovered many of the casues of compromise to officer safety and wellness, and he contends that police officers will be well prepared to cope with unanticipated or rapidly changing encounters if they possess the right tools and the know-how to command and control field encounters and life's pressures. Here Blum provides practical tools for survival in law enforcement, by combining his clinical knowledge with true stories of police officers for an attention-grabbing and informative book.

This book provides time- and experience-proven advice for responding safely and effectively to threats to a law enforcement officerfs safety. It relies on law enforcementfs bloody history to reveal what has gone wrong for a very long time — and how to fix it so that no more cops die needlessly. This book identifies the cop killers and the fatal errors that cops make, and it explores how these incidents happen and why. Most important of all, the book goes into detail about how to prevent these terminal errors and furnishes to-the-point advice for avoiding them. These tactics and techniques work. It offers the same common sense advice that solid patrol sergeants have been sharing with their briefing room charges for a long while. It has been assembled by a police chief who spent 15 years as a sergeant. WHY COPS DIE can be used in a lot of ways, all of them useful for drastically reducing the number of officers who die on the job every year. It should be issued to every law enforcement academy recruit. It is aimed across the spectrum of the law enforcement organization from the rookie to the first-line supervisor to the command staff. Chiefs and sheriffs will find it of value, as will those directly responsible for the training of law enforcement officers. By applying practical, potentially lifesaving advice to their daily duties law enforcementfs first-line practitioners can sharply reduce the number of peacekeepers who die or are maimed in the future. That effort begins here.

“A remarkable book.”—Malcolm Gladwell, San Francisco Chronicle Deaths of civilians at the hands of on-duty police are in the national spotlight as never before. How many killings by police occur annually? What circumstances provoke police to shoot to kill? Who dies? The lack of answers to these basic questions points to a crisis in American government that urgently requires the attention of policy experts. When Police Kill is a groundbreaking analysis of the use of lethal force by police in the United States and how its death toll can be reduced. Franklin Zimring compiles data from federal records, crowdsourced research, and investigative journalism to provide a comprehensive, fact-based picture of how, when, where, and why police resort to deadly force. Of the 1,100 killings by police in the United States in 2015, he shows, 85 percent were fatal shootings and 95 percent of victims were male. The death rates for African Americans and Native Americans are twice their share of the population. Civilian deaths from shootings and other police actions are vastly higher in the United States than in other developed nations, but American police also confront an unusually high risk of fatal assault. Zimring offers policy prescriptions for how federal, state, and local governments can reduce killings by police without risking the lives of officers. Criminal prosecution of police officers involved in killings is rare and only necessary in extreme cases. But clear administrative rules could save hundreds of lives without endangering police officers. “Roughly 1,000 Americans die each year at the hands of the police...The civilian body count does not seem to be declining, even though violent crime generally and the on-duty deaths of police officers are down sharply...Zimring’s most explosive assertion—which leaps out...—is that police leaders don’t care...To paraphrase the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre, every country gets the police it deserves.” —Bill Keller, New York Times “If you think for one second that the issue of cop killings doesn’t go to the heart of the debate about gun violence, think again. Because what Zimring shows is that not only are most fatalities which occur at the hands of police the result of cops using guns, but the number of such deaths each year is undercounted by more than half!...[A] valuable and important book...It needs to be read.” —Mike Weisser, Huffington Post

In this fascinating new book, Vincent Henry (a 21-year veteran of the NYPD who recently retired to become a university professor) explores the psychological transformations and adaptations that result from police officers' encounters with death. Police can encounter death frequently in the course of their duties, and these encounters may range from casual contacts with the deaths of others to the most profound and personally consequential confrontations with their own mortality. Using the 'survivor psychology' model as its theoretical base, this insightful and provocative research ventures into a previously unexplored area of police psychology to illuminate and explore the new modes of adaptation, thought, and feeling that result from various types of death encounters in police work. The psychology of survival asserts that the psychological world of the survivor--one who has come in close physical or psychic contact with death but nevertheless managed to live--is characterized by five themes: psychic numbing, death guilt, the death imprint, suspicion of counterfeit nurturance, and the struggle to make meaning. These themes become manifest in the survivor's behavior, permeating his or her lifestyle and worldview. Drawing on extensive interviews with police officers in five nominal categories--rookie officers, patrol sergeants, crime scene technicians, homicide detectives, and officers who survived a mortal combat situation in which an assailant or another officer died--Henry identifies the impact such death encounters have upon the individual, the police organization, and the occupational culture of policing. He has produced a comprehensive and highly textured interpretation of police psychology and police behavior, bolstered by the unique insights that come from his personal experience as an officer, his intimate familiarity with the subtleties and nuances of the police culture's value and belief systems, and his meticulous research and rigorous method. Death Work provides a unique prism through which to view the individual, organizational, and social dynamics of contemporary urban policing. With a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton and a chapter devoted to the local police response to the World Trade Center attacks, Death Work will be of interest to psychologists and criminal justice experts, as well as police officers eager to gain insight into their unique relationship to death.