Police Psychology | Eating Bugs

Posted: November 17, 2016 in Public Information Bureau
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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 beetlemake a little stop in Hong Kong on the way home.  I figured, this is the culture, I should try a bug.  So, I summoned up the courage and bought one.  Took the shell off as I was instructed and bit into it.  It was crunchy on the outside, but boy the inside was where the treat was.  It tasted like the inside of a large bug, sort of like a shrimp paste gone really bad.  It was much worse than the tequila worm from college, but then I had drank a significant amount of the bottle and couldn’t feel anything.  Here it was just me and the bug.  No Tequila, no revelry, no people encouraging you with their “yechs” and “oh my god he’s eating the worm.” 

Later that evening we went to a sort of “Denny’s” and had Hong Kong food which was rather good in an eastern kind of way.  I was comfortable with the food.  At the table next to me was a group of cute college girls out on the town and they ordered a plate of barbecue pigeon heads, about 50 of these little heads looking up at you while you ate their beaks and eyes.  I stared at them so long, they asked if I wanted to try them.  I did, and they weren’t that bad, but man the culture was really different.  When I went to China on a later trip to work again, there was a whole market with different kinds of bugs, silkworms, centipedes, deep fried scorpions, sautéed tarantulas.   Some say they only eat bugs for either medicinal purpose or to freak out foreigners.  Freaked Out!  Worked for me.  There are other places where we see culture first hand, although not through bugs.  Like in our police officers. Read the rest of this entry »

Police Psychology | Brain Eaters

Posted: November 15, 2016 in Mastering Emotions
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Police Psychology | Brain Eaters

By Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

In Telugu language, the second most popular language in India, they have a phrase that is highly important in police psychology – burra tinoddu. police psychology, zombie, police stressNot to be confused with the “Lion King’s” Hakuna Matata which tells you not to worry and be happy eating grubs and big juicy beetles, Burra Tinoddu roughly means “Don’t eat my brain.”   Damn, there are a lot of brain-eaters out there! And, the holidays just bring them out of the woodwork. We all have various interpersonal relationships: friends, family, spouses, children, bosses, co-workers, even the employees behind the counter at our favorite restaurants or coffee shops. In general, interpersonal relationships are very positive, and they are healthy for your own personal growth and development. However, we all have some people in our lives that are just physically and mentally draining. We walk away from any experience with them feeling like we just ran a full-marathon, and then hiked across the Sahara desert, and finished by climbing Mount Everest. And that’s when we’ve spoken to them for five minutes—don’t get me started on how we feel after talking to them for a whole hour. They are worse than zombies when eating your brain. At least zombies don’t talk incessantly. Read the rest of this entry »

Police Psychology: Are You Biased, Of Course…

Posted: November 11, 2016 in Motives and Opportunity
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Police Psychology:  Are You Biased, Of Course…

By Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

 

Just when you thought all the stupidity in the world was surrounding the election this year, I thought I would tell you some more bad news. Judicial Watch just released an article that states that police departments can no longer stop a person from becoming a police officer because they have a criminal background or drug abuse.   Apparently it is discriminatory (see the article here).*  Am I missing something, isn’t the purpose of the selection process to discriminate good and bad employees, people who earn a job versus people whose record indicates they could be involved in corruption, breaking the law or a become a problem later.  Isn’t past behavior the best predictor of future behavior?    The inmates would literally be running the asylum.  Now is that a bad idea?

In 1966, Phillippe de Broca released a French film call King of Hearts which explored the topics of the inmates running an asylum, in fact it was a town being run by an asylum.  In World War I, a town had a bomb planted by the departing Germans that threatened to blow up the whole town.  The townspeople evacuated and they sent in a Scottish soldier to defuse the bomb.  The town had a large mental asylum on the outskirts and the someone left the asylum doors open and the inmates inhabited the town and took on the roles of the town folks.  What transpired was an absolutely hilarious situation comedy as the inmates would do things that were completely against convention and lived life to have fun, not accomplish things like when the town was inhabited by the regular residents.  They held parades, had ill-conceived romances, wore outlandish clothing, all in an attempt to make life fun.  Could we exist this way?  Could our lives use  reduction of convention?  Can we learn to laugh at ourselves again? Read the rest of this entry »

Police Psychology: Intrinsic Heart Rate – A Landmark for the Ability to Engage in Rational Thought

Posted: November 3, 2016 in Police Stress
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Police Psychology: Intrinsic Heart Rate – A Landmark for the Ability to Engage in Rational Thought

by Doug Gentz, Ph.D. – Psychological Services

Your intrinsic (inherent) heart rate is how fast your heart would beat when you are calm and at rest if it wasn’t slowed down to your (observed) resting rate by your vagus nerve. Your resting heart rate is best measured  when you’re comfortably laying down and relaxed. The “normal”  resting rate for a healthy, young adult ranges from about 60 to 85 beats per minute (bpm), slightly higher on average for females than males. Individuals with well conditioned cardiovascular systems may have lower resting rates, often less than 60 bpm.

intrinsic-heart-rateLet’s start with two systems in your body — the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PSNS).  The sympathetic nervous system raises you up, pumps blood to your muscles, makes you heart rate go up, releases acid in your stomach to chew up the food, makes you breathe shallow and quick and all stuff so you can fight or flight.  It throws your brain into the mode that causes tunnel vision, so it affect everything.  Now you can’t just keep going up and up, so the parasympathetic nervous system calms you down.  It releases the different hormones and stuff that calms all the body down so you can relax.   They work in conjunction with each other to regulate your body and make it a mean fighting machine, or a run fast and get away from the Tyrannosaurs Rex running machine.
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Police Psychology: Be the Solution, Not the Cause

Posted: November 1, 2016 in Rank and Leadership
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Police Psychology:  Be the Solution, Not the Cause

by Lt. Jason Childers, Texas

We frequently hear about how stressful police work is, and the sacrifices we make in the service of our community is an oft-repeated narrative in police circles. The jerks we deal with on the street, the trauma of violent incidents, rotating shifts, the state of hypervigilance, concerns of personal safety and missed family time are all considered as sources of stress inherent to the job. These shared difficulties help to draw us together as a law enforcement family, but one factor consistently overlooked is that we are one of the main sources of our own problems. The cop staring back at you in the mirror may have more to do with causing job related stress than anything dealt with on the street. The good news is, the cop staring back at you in the mirror can also be part of the solution, especially if you’re a supervisor.
 
How was life when you entered the academy compared to how things are going today? With stringent entry-level standards in policing, most police officers begin their careers in excellent physical and mental health. Along the way, many officers develop signs and symptoms of stress which include poor job performance, sleep disturbances, marital discord, domestic violence, PTSD, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and even suicide. You’ve likely been through some of this yourself, or you’ve seen others deal with it.
 
But where does all of this come from?

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