Exposure to physical violence in childhood--the mental health impact on police recruits

In an article published last month in the The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles, authors Tuttle et al. noted that the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) may be especially important to consider when evaluating the origins of police officers’ stress –not just their on-the-job experiences. They may have had “early life adversity that predisposes them to health risks before even entering an inherently stressful career in law enforcement.” Tuttle et al. investigated the relationship between pre-career exposure to direct and indirect physical violence among a sample of 1,072 police recruits surveyed in the Longitudinal Study of Recruits Data, which was collected to study the life course of new officers and was part of a set of surveys conducted in the National Police Research Platform, Phase I [United States], 2009-2011 (ICPSR 34518), distributed by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD). The Recruits Data respondents were asked about a variety of topics including their backgrounds, emotional distress and lifetime history of exposure to physical violence. The results of Tuttle et al.’s analyses showed that “direct exposure to physical violence prior to age 18 was a significant factor for recruit emotional distress, whereas indirect exposure to violence did not significantly predict emotional distress.” According to the authors, this implies “candidates who are recruited from communities characterized by high levels of neighborhood or school violence may be more resilient to the effects of early career police stress, but recruits who have personally been victimized by physical violence are vulnerable to the negative effects of emotional stress in a training academy setting.” Their findings also showed that married recruits had lower emotional distress, in keeping with other research pointing to the protective effects of marriage on health.