Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

Police (IACP) (1986). Some of the more significant

applications of this specialty area are discussed in the

following sections.

Pre-Employment Selection

Pre-employment selection has been the earliest known

usage of psychology in law enforcement. Recent

research has concluded that police recruitment selec-

tion procedures vary greatly, that there is no standard

assessment process, and that there is an extensive vari-

ety of test battery composition. In an attempt to pro-

vide specific standards and constraints for a process

with wide variance, both the Police and Public Safety

Psychology Section of Division 18 of the APA and the

Police Psychological Services section of the IACP

proposed and ratified, via membership vote, a set of

guidelines for pre-employment psychological evalua-

tion. These guidelines established that only licensed

or certified psychologists trained and experienced in

psychological test interpretation and law enforce-

mentpsychological assessment techniques should con-

duct psychological screening for police agencies.

Furthermore, police psychologists must adhere to the

ethical principles and standards of the APA and all

state and federal laws, including the Americans with

Disabilities Act. The test battery must include objective,

job-related, validated psychological instruments, includ-

ing a cognitive test. Every test battery must also include

an individual face-to-face, semistructured interview.

Fitness-for-Duty Evaluations

Along with pre-employment screening for police can-

didates, the external police consultant often has the

task of facilitating mandatory fitness-for-duty evalua-

tions (FFDE). According to the IACP (Psychological

Fitness-For-Duty Evaluation Guidelines, 2004), a psy-

chological FFDE is a formal, specialized examination

of an incumbent employee (typically a sworn police

officer) that results from objective evidence that the

employee may be unable to safely or effectively per-

form a defined job task and/or a reasonable basis for

believing that this may be attributable to psychological

factors. The central purpose of an FFDE is to deter-

mine whether the employee is psychologically fit to

safely and effectively carry out essential job tasks and

responsibilities. At a minimum, the evaluator should

be a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist with training

and experience in psychological assessment,especially

in the evaluation of law enforcement personnel. The

police psychologist evaluator provides recommenda-

tions to the referring department. The department is

responsible for the ultimate determination of the dispo-

sition of the employee.

Clinical Intervention

The more typical responsibility, especially for the in-

house staff psychologist, is the provision of clinical

intervention and responses. Interestingly, in major

metropolitan police departments, crisis responses—

such as officer-involved shootings, severe vehicular

accidents, major injuries and deaths, suicide attempts

and completions, and SWAT (special weapons and

tactics) callouts—are quite common, occurring on

average once per week. Critical incidents within the

law enforcement community are conceptualized as

traumatic events. Thus, the event is conceptualized as

the officer’s having experienced an event significantly

outside the range of typical human experience, such

that his or her responses are typical reactions to the

abnormal event. The most frequently occurring psy-

chological sequelae following a critical incident

within law enforcement (especially if the police offi-

cer has the thought, “I’m going to die”) are social

isolation/withdrawal, sleep disturbances, flashbacks,

depression and anxiety, a heightened sense of danger,

hypervigilance, and increased alcohol/substance

abuse. Concurrent with crisis response capability, the

staff psychologist is actively involved in providing

stress inoculation training at the department’s training

bureau. Stress inoculation training has been found to

be successful in empowering police officers to pre-

vent, or at least lessen, the psychological impact of

stress within the responsibilities of police responses.

The more typical psychological interventions

police psychologists routinely undertake are individ-

ual, marital, and family counseling. The most frequent

presenting issues for individual therapy are stress/

anxiety, depression, substance abuse, domestic vio-

lence, and, more recently, compulsive gambling. The

affective disorders and marital and family interven-

tions are triaged by the staff psychologist to other

licensed mental health staff members of the psycho-

logical services section. These mental health profes-

sionals are then tasked with providing confidential

intervention, usually on a short-term basis of 8 to 12

weeks of therapy. All substance abuse, domestic vio-

lence, and compulsive gambling cases are assigned to

578 ———Police Psychologists

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