myAIPMMapping Demands: How to prepare police officers to cope with pandemic-specific stressors
Marie Ottilie Frenkel, Laura Giessing, Emma Jaspaert, Mario Staller | European Law Enforcement Research Bulletin
To better prepare the police force for high-stress situations, such as Covid-19 pandemic virtual reality technology is investigated as a police training method. Policing during the COVID-19 pandemic can be considered a ‘critical police incident’ (although of prolonged duration and global impact than usual police incidents), lockdown enforcement required the officers to respond to novel, uncertain, uncontrollable, and threatening situations. It meant street patrol officers were confronted with various challenges; such as the risk of infection as a constant threat to their physical integrity, changing governmental measures leading to a shift in calls for services, numerous alterations in policing protocols, high(er) workload due to infected and quarantined officers and more frequent encounters with anxious or intransigent individuals aggravated by the fear of contagion, economic uncertainty, and isolation.
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Mapping Demands: How to prepare police officers to cope with pandemic-specific stressors, Marie Ottilie Frenkel, Laura Giessing, Emma Jaspaert, Mario Staller, European Law Enforcement Research Bulletin, 2021