Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes

Police Psychology:  The Police Brain by Gary S. Aumiller. Ph.D.  ABPP   What if in the hiring process for police officers you could pick someone resistant to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, have the best ability to function under pressure, make good quick decisions with better accuracy than normal people, and someone who can control bias […]

Police Psychology:  Reproducibility by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP   So, my 11-year old daughter had to do a science project earlier this year and she decided because her mother was constantly saying that playing on the IPad was hurting her, she would test out whether IPad play really had an impact on her attention […]

Police Psychology:  Suicide Challenges by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP   It’s just an image on a App.  They used a Japanese doll artist’s rendition of a horror figure, a girl that supposedly killed herself and is apparently haunting those who live.  Ah, who knows.  What is more important is she contacts young persons on […]

Police Psychology: Law Enforcement Longevity and Loss of Self Michael Tavolacci, PhD Peak Performance Biofeedback, Inc. (The interpretation of statistics and the opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s own, not reflective of the website or the editor’s.) Consider: In 2011 65 police officers were shot and killed! (Violanti, 2012) In 2011 147 police […]

  Police Psychology:  Active Shooter Events and News Media Reporting Philip J. Swift, Ph.D. It is well known that Active Shooter Events (ASE) constitute a threat to public safety in the United States. The overwhelming goal of an Active Shooter Offender(s) (ASO) is to murder and injury as many people as possible before being denied […]

Police Psychology:  Emotional/Social Intelligence New Software Upgrade for Police Officers by William Cottringer, Ph.D. Effective policing involves excellent use of all cognitive skills, especially emotional and social intelligence (E/SQ) Emotional/social intelligence can best be defined as involving the following group of skills: 1. Self-awareness. This is the ability to know and understand your own emotions, […]

Police Psychology Interview:  Intelligence and Counterintelligence with James Turner, Ph.D.   Some of the earliest use of psychology in operational policing was by the military.  I remember reading stories of how B. F. Skinner invented a pigeon-controlled missile which were much more accurate than the guidance systems available at the time.  Ebbinghaus had military applications of […]

Police Psychology:  Stop the Murder! by Dr. Gary S. Aumiller Enough is enough!  In fourteen days, there has been a wholesale killing of people in a concert in Manchester, at a tourist site in England, and a guy with a hammer attacking people in Paris, in the shadow of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.  My […]

Police Psychology | Master Police Coaches: “Building A Better Cop” Marla Friedman, Police Psychologist   Born out of the academy, the Probationer is a blank slate. Mega assembly required running the gamut from appropriate deployment of de-escalation and tactical skills training, mental health and suicide prevention techniques, and development of a mentoring relationship, which transitions […]

Police Psychology | Opioids and Opiates by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP   I live on Long Island, NY.  Last year 493 people died on Long Island from opioid and opiate overdose with Fentanyl being the worse drug for deaths.  That’s more than were killed in car accidents in one of the most heavily trafficked […]

Police Psychology | Detecting Bombs by Matthew Sharps, Ph.D. and Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP To order a copy of Matthew Sharps Book click HERE

Police Psychology:  Does Torture Work? by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP If you go on the internet there are hundreds of articles that give you a resounding “No” to this question.  They repeat the same material, the same studies and give the same reasons to say torture doesn’t even begin to work and shouldn’t be […]

Police Psychology | “Inside the Mind” of an Anarchist by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP There are the guys seen dressed in all black with black masks that are crashing chairs through windows and ripping up cars alongside of the road at the recent demonstrations.  They are destruction-oriented and do not tend to favor either […]

Police Psychology | Eating Bugs by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP Water Beetles!  Yummm….  I watched as people walked up to a street vendor and gathered a fried bug on a stick when I was in Hong Kong.  I had been working with the Singapore Police Department and decided to make a little stop in […]

Police Psychology | Killer Klowns!  Who Are All These Bozos? by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP Killer Clowns!  What evil lurks behind the mask and the florescent green hair?  I saw one down the street and he had a big knife to hack teens into little bits that can be fed to the street dog […]

Police Psychology | Divorce in Cops and Corrections by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP I just spent the past week at the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology meeting.  I had been the first executive director of the group and was the president the year before that, so I (with two others) totally ran the […]

Police Psychology | Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP   I can’t wait to see the polls this week.  Two weeks ago Trump was behind by 10 points, earlier last week by 5 points, the end of last week by 2 points and yesterday he was ahead by 3 points […]

Police Psychology | Honesty:  An Endangered Species by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP   I was at a party this Labor Day weekend and I talked to a New York Port Authority Police Officer who was originally from Peru.  His mom had cancer and I felt real bad for him.  She was only given a […]

Police Psychology | It Isn’t All About Islam by Geoff Dean, Ph.D. (Australia) and Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  (U.S.A.) What causes people to shoot up a gay nightclub?  Or, shoot up a holiday party of co-workers or drive a truck into the middle of a crowd celebrating independence day killing a lot of children?  Or […]

Police Psychology | Stalking the Stalker Hamish Brown, MBE Hamish retired in 2004 as a Detective Inspector on the Specialist Crime Directorate at New Scotland Yard after over 30 years service with the Metropolitan Police, London England   It is easy to think stalking is all about celebrities and the stars, after all when we […]

Police Psychology | The Noble Cause of Policing by Mark Foreman, PsyD “. . . every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”  ­– Robert Kennedy, 25 September 1963 – As I sit down to write, the […]

Police Psychology | Republicans Show a Bit of Class by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP I was going to avoid making any political comment this voting season, but I saw somethings at the Republican National Convention that was just extraordinary and warmed my heart and mind, so I thought I would comment. I am old […]

Investigating “G.I. Joe” | A Critical Incident Chief George Filenko      Guest Author The events of September 1, 2015 were a life changing experience not only for me but for thousands of officers that somehow became a part of the Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz saga.  

On that hot, humid, sunny day radio traffic no officer ever wants […]

Police Psychology | Humor and Culture   I was lecturing on police psychology to a conference crowd in Singapore, and I had included a funny metaphor of the development of the Apollo moon vehicle by NASA to show the rigidity in police organizations. The punch line is that NASA, like police organizations, relied on decisions […]

Police Psychology | Dreams: What Do They Mean? In police psychology we often get asked the question, “what does my dream mean?” A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep…When Cinderella sang this song many years ago, she was just adding to an age-old psychological and philosophical debate. Are dreams a […]

Hogwarts and Police Psychology by Drs. Gary Aumiller and Scott Stubenrauch (Guest Blogger) What if we told you that Hogwarts was real and police psychology is used frequently with the new students? What if there really was a Sorting Hat that could define your personality and place you into a specific house? However, instead of […]

Police Psychology | I Said Blog – Not BLOB   The police force has been around for years, and yet police psychology is a relatively new field. This is a really fascinating concept, because police stress is not a new thing—it’s as old as the job itself! But expanding police psychology is not the only […]

Let’s Talk Numbers By Yocheved “Ayden” Pahmer Police Psychology — let’s talk numbers. There are many cops out there. In fact, according to studies done by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are over 1.1 million cops in the United States. That number doesn’t include part-time employees, volunteers, or support staff. […]

Police Psychology | The War on Police: “Officer-Directed Violence” Ron Martinelli, Ph.D., CMI-V, BCFT, CFA Let’s see a show of hands. Every one of you who recognize these names raise em up. Michael Brown? Freddie Grey? OK. Now how about Darren Goforth, Steven Vincent, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu? No hands? That’s not all that […]

Police Psychology | Officers Disproportionally Killing Black Men:  Another False Narrative Guest Blogger Ron Martinelli, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned forensic criminologist and police expert directing the nation’s only multidisciplinary Forensic Death Investigations and Independent Review Team at www.martinelliandassoc.com.  His perspanl website is at www.drronmartinelli.com   Among several prominent false narratives being unethically forwarded by […]

He’s ranked as a Major, and serves as Deputy Chief of Police and Director of Threat Management Services at Virginia Tech University. He was hired after the awful situation when a shooter took the lives of 32 people, mostly students, before taking his own life. This is truly the dark side of what we deal […]

I was particularly interested in the lone terrorist because I was in Phoenix this January visiting friends when Jared Loughner shot and killed six people, injuring 19, in nearby Tucson.  There has to be a way for mental health professionals to see this coming.   I wanted to look into the phenomenon of the lone terrorist […]