Peer-reviewed Book & Chapters
Book
This volume delves into the wellness, health, and resilience of police officers. Drawing on insights from academics and police leaders, it explores various aspects such as essential training components, prevention strategies, and intervention methods informed by best practices and research. The book aims to pinpoint ways to implement preventive measures across the continuum of care, from primary to tertiary, to enhance the well-being and safety of police officers. Additionally, it addresses organizational and operational stressors to improve occupational health and safety. This resource is well-suited for police leaders, criminology practitioners, mental health professionals, and policymakers.
Konstantinos Papazoglou, Katy Kamkar (Eds.)
Chapters
This chapter looks into detail at the various pathways to build workplace mental health by identifying organizational modifiable risk factors and identifying protective factors and strengths for prevention, growth, and resiliency. Discussion around common mental health conditions, prevention and continuum of care, and risk factors related to moral suffering, compassion fatigue, and burnout is highlighted along with protective factors, including, for instance, resiliency, self-compassion, compassion satisfaction, and psychological flexibility. Practical strategies for leaders are offered for better organizational culture, stigma reduction, and optimizing wellbeing. This chapter brings a unique twist to current debates around mental health and wellbeing, by having the testimonial from a veteran police officer who has been responded to a myriad of critical incidents and shares his narrative of experiences and insights as a veteran police officer. This chapter concludes with the importance of optimizing mental health education, prevention, and interventions to further healthy and more proactive organizational culture and workplace mental health.
Grant Edward, Katy Kamkar and Konstantinos Papazoglou (2022)
This textbook addresses existing gaps in police research, education, and training, and provides guidance on how to respond to and address the vulnerability that arises in policing practice. It guides students through the conceptual and also the practical issues of managing vulnerability in policing with case studies and practitioners’ views from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the US, Canada, France, and beyond to the Maldives, China, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It includes key concepts, views from the front-line, further reading and activities in each chapter. Policing Practices and Vulnerable People is aimed at researchers and practitioners working with police. While focussed on democratic policing practices, this book includes case studies and practitioners’ views from a wide range of approaches, including those from the Global South. This book provides readers with a framework that can assist them in converting conceptual knowledge to critical, ethical policing practice.
Katy Kamkar (2021)
The Australian first responder community – police, ambulance, firefighters, emergency services and border protection – face many challenges in serving the public interest. This collection of perspectives is the first attempt to draw on the experiences of qualified practitioners and the expertise of leading academics to examine the moral dimensions of vocational wellbeing. The aim is two-fold. First, to help executives and leaders become more attentive to the moral dimensions of first responder employment, mitigating possible risk and managing potential disruption to personal narratives and institutional reputations. Second, to assist human resources officers and workplace supervisors deal more creatively with the causes and consequences of the moral dilemmas and ethical tensions confronting continuing and departing members. The contributors believe that promoting and preserving vocational well-being is important not only to the institutions that keep the public safe but to the individuals who see public safety as their calling. Reflecting on these themes will increase institutional loyalty, decrease workplace turbulence and enhance both return to work and formal separation processes.
Katy Kamkar and Konstantinos Papazoglou (2020)
The idea of moral injury has been pervasive in human societies for thousands of years, and perhaps since the existence of humankind. In the Greco-Roman tradition, warrior nar- ratives reference the experience of moral conflicts on the battlefield (called miasma or “mίasma” e moral pollution and purification), defining it as a situation wherein someone with legitimate and recognized authority betrays what is right in a critical situation (Shay, 2014). In the modern era, conceptualization of moral injury is derived from research and clinical work with United States military personnel and veterans. It became apparent through both research and clinical practice that veterans who served in combat zones were exposed to traumas that altered their moral beliefs and values systems; that is, some veterans experienced a violation of their morals or beliefs during their service and became skeptical about whether or not the world is a just, benevolent, and safe place. Thereby, a formal definition refers to moral injury as exposure to unprecedented traumatic life events wherein one perpetrates, fails to prevent, or witnesses actions that “transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” (Litz et al., 2009, p. 1). Similarly, the US Marine Corps uses the term “inner conflict” when referring to experiences involving moral injury (Nash & Litz, 2013). Inner conflict may occur not only when a Marine experiences extraordinary violence (e.g., terrorists use children as “shields”) but also in moments when they are ordered to leave a wounded comrade behind in order to save their own lives.
Katy Kamkar, Chuck Russo, Brian Chopko, Brooke McQueery Tuttle (2019)
