Resilience, Control and the Wellbeing of Police Officers: A Complex Investigation?

Resilience is often identified by police officers as being a necessary quality for dealing with the demands of ‘the job’. But what is resilience? What makes someone more ‘resilient’ than someone else? Can we build up or increase our resilience, and if so, how? In this chapter we try to answer some of these questions by unpacking what is meant by resilience and are we all describing the same thing? What does it mean in a policing context? Is it related to our internal psychology (e.g., personality traits and coping methods)? We introduce several likely ‘key influences’ of individual and collective levels of police officer resilience, including Locus of Control (Rotter, 1966) and the psychology of individual differences. We end the chapter with some suggestions for how, both individually and collectively, police officers might be trained to increase their levels of resilience, particularly when faced with emotionally, psychologically, and physically impactful events, such as attending road traffic collisions (RTCs), investigating violent crimes, and dealing with distressed members of the public.