USC Resilience and Wellness (RAW) Project for Law Enforcement personnel

Health care access

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Officers are exposed to traumatic calls for service daily, including child abuse, domestic violence, car crashes, and homicides. Evidence suggests that exposure to law enforcement work is associated with increases in many forms of stress, including physical, psychosocial, and anticipatory stress. A 2019 study reported that twice as many officers died of suicide compared with dying in the line of duty. The level of stress experienced by officers can interfere with critical decision-making that could put the safety of the public at risk. High levels of stress can interfere with critical decision-making that officers need to have. Research has shown that when police officers are highly stressed, they may engage in more aggressive, biased policing tactics that may harm community members. Therefore, addressing and reducing the impacts of occupational stress on law enforcement personnel can improve their overall mental and physical health and work to keep the community safer.

The RAW Project will teach trauma-informed strategies to law enforcement officers that build resilience, reduce compassion fatigue, burnout and secondary trauma symptoms and behaviors, and improve critical decision-making while reducing overly aggressive policing tactics. Law enforcement personnel will be trained in The Community Resilience Model (CRM) which is a groundbreaking, evidence-based wellness initiative. The primary focus of this skills-based nervous system stabilization program is to reset the system’s natural balance. The 6 CRM skills help people understand their nervous system and learn to track sensations connected to their own wellbeing. With practice, the nervous system begins to return to its normal balance (referred to as the Resilient Zone). Using the wisdom of their own bodies, people experience rapid relief from symptoms accompanied by increased sense of control over future wellness. The RAW Project is a clinical trial and field study that will assess the effectiveness of this approach for officers in real time. The goal is to train approximately 10 LASD and CHP peer support law enforcement personnel as CRM Teachers who in turn will train 200 officers in CRM during a year. The RAW Project will monitor and analyze biological markers (heart rate variability (HRV) and sleep patterns) of stress and self-report inventories on compassion fatigue, mental health, physical health, critical decision-making and aggressive policing incidents to determine success.

The impact of the RAW Project will ultimately be reflected in reports of reductions in negative health indicators of police and complaints about police biased and aggressive policing tactics. If this project is successful, it will be adopted by all law enforcement agencies throughout Los Angeles County which will increase better relationships between the public and police and improve their overall wellness.