Posts Tagged ‘police psychology’

Police Psychology: Dehydration

Posted: May 4, 2019 in Mastering Emotions, Stories
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Police Psychology:  Dehydration

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D  ABPP

My head was beating, one of those really bad headaches that only come every once in long while.  This one was different though.  I had a little vertigo when I stood up, so much so that I was having trouble standing and needed to lie back down.  My heart was racing: I was extremely tired, in fact all I wanted to do was sleep.  My thinking was all messed up, like I was in a fog and couldn’t concentrate.  I was craving a roast beef and tomato sandwich from a street deli back home.  I hadn’t been to the bathroom in a long while, a couple of days.  I wasn’t going now because I couldn’t stand.  My joints were badly aching.  I was sure I was coming to the end of my life as the century had just turned and I was 43 years old.  My father only made it to the ripe old age of 45.  Besides, I felt I was needing to die to feel better.  With help, I made my way over to the infirmary at McMurdo station, where a physician’s assistant diagnosed me with the Antarctica Crud, a sort of flu-like disease people seems to get on first visiting the continent.  I went to the bathroom on the way out and noticed the tiny drops of urine were deep yellow, almost brown.  Then a thought occurred to me.

“Um, excuse me,” I asked the infirmary staff.  “Could this all just be dehydration?”

“Not if you are drinking your 6 liters of water.”  They snapped back.

“Six liters!!  That’s a little more than eight 8-ounce glasses I was always taught.”

“This is the coldest, driest pace on earth.  You need three times as much water.  Didn’t they tell you that?  People die from dehydration here.” (more…)

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Police Psychology: The Accused

Posted: January 4, 2019 in Mastering Emotions
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Police Psychology:  The Accused

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP

This column has been known to cause some stir for the politics being read into it, but mostly the column is apolitical.  However, I am very nervous and followed the senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh closely.  It started for me after the allegations of sexual misconduct when he was a teenager were well in motion.  It wasn’t the sexual misconduct that caught my attention, it was the people with law degrees saying the onus of proof lies on Kavanaugh.  In other words, the accuser should be considered telling the absolute truth and the accused should be mounting a defense, if he was even in the vicinity or can remember where he was on that specific date 35 years ago.  Scary stuff!!  Especially for someone who works with the public.  And to make it even scarier, the senator from Hawaii Mazie Hirono said “he is very much against women’s reproductive choice,” therefore he must have committed the act he is accused of.  That sent a chill down my spine.  He has an opinion against her opinion, so he must be guilty of attempted rape.  Imagine if they believed everything against cops that is thrown out there.  Oh wait, they already do!!

If we have learned anything from Ferguson, or Freddie Gray, or any of the big cases is we must wait for an investigation, or at least the second half of the videotape.  Essentially, a case must be investigated before it is set out in public.  The “rush to judgement” is something cops deal with all the time, and there is not really any training for it at this point that I am aware of.  How do you handle being under such amazing scrutiny and now find yourself going crazy?  It is interesting that the accusers will say you have got some guilt when you falter under scrutiny, but isn’t that normal.  The accusers will say you must have done it when you get angry or over emotional, but again that is a normal emotion to being falsely accused as well.  Then there are those that pile on with other accusation or even made up lies which will cause more emotion and more of the appearance you are just starting to lose it.  We don’t really know the truth in the first place, but the destruction an accusation can do can make an entire life unfold.

Okay, so I have said nothing new.  Now let’s talk about what to do if you are accused.  F. B. Meyer who was a famous Baptist minister in England once said: “We make a mistake in trying always to clear ourselves. We should be wiser to go straight on, humbly doing the next thing, and leaving God to vindicate us.” The cops I know have a different standard: you can tell a man is guilty by the effort they put in to prove they are innocent.  I am not sure either is right, but both should be considered. (more…)

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Police Psychology Book Review: Towards the integration of police psychology techniques to combat juvenile delinquency in K-12 classrooms

Posted: December 19, 2018 in Books
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Police Psychology Book Review:  Rose, Gary. (2013) Towards the integration of police psychology techniques to combat juvenile delinquency in K-12 classrooms

by Paul Cech

 

Gary Rose revised his doctoral dissertation to create a book that will be of special interest to readers who are peace officers; teachers; police, school, and community psychologists, criminologists, school counselors, and many others.

The author begins with a brief reference to Newtown, Connecticut–December 12, 2012. He does so not to focus on school shootings, but to bring attention to a role of police officers could fulfill in schools. Instead of pushing for an armory in every school, Rose flips the idea around, he “…creates a framework for envisioning how trained police might best work hand in hand with teachers to forge better and more cohesive classroom management practice, and in so doing forge new community linkages, stronger schools and ultimately even more effective police forces (p.17).” (more…)

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Police Psychology: Reproducibility

Posted: December 5, 2018 in Public Information Bureau
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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 span.  So, we set it up with three alternate forms of a neurological test, the Trail Making Test, a connect the dots type of activity, (okay I helped a little), one before, one in the middle and one at the end.  There was an hour and a half of Minecraft in-between each of the trials.  We got her friends over and measured the change from trial to trial, with both time and number of errors as the variables.  The results….well, I’ll get to that.

We start training kids from an early age on the rigors of scientific method and how to make a scientific study.  We train them how to test a theory and how to make a hypothesis.  We train them that science requires experiments to answer questions and learn more about our world.  What I think we forget to train them in is that one study does not provide a definitive answer but only a suggestion.  The ignorance of the statement that it is only a suggestion is how we come up with a bunch of “Fake Science” being reported and guiding our way of life. (more…)

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Police Psychology: Suicide Challenge

Posted: November 20, 2018 in Public Information Bureau
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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 the internet and asks them to download her.   Then she gives them instructions over the course of their interactions trying to gain information about them, or their parents, or do a variety of dangerous self-harm tasks, she makes bullying threats, shames them, then talks them into killing themselves.  It’s called the “MOMO SUICIDE CHALLENGE.”  Mostly ‘tweens and young teenagers play with her online.  My 11-year old knows about it.  Her friends do.  Most parents do not.  Many cops do not, YET!

The Blue Whale Hoax started in Russia.  It was the same sort of thing, a person interrupts you from Facebook or some other App and asks you to join them by giving them your phone number or by connecting as friends.  Then they slowly give you directions, Blue Whale had over 50 posts fed to you once a day, ending in asking you to kill yourself.  People have tied this to suicides around the world, but no one has evidence of a direct causal element.  Asking pre-teen kids to kill themselves – does it get any sicker than this? (more…)

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