PSYC 2400: Police Psychology (Selection and Stress)

Contents

1. 1. History of Police Selection
2. 2. Police Selection in Canada
3. 3. Police Selection Process
4. 4. The Validity of Police Selection Instruments
   1. 4.1 Selection Interviews
   2. 4.2 Psychological Tests
   3. 4.3 Situational Tests
5. 5. Police Discretion
   1. 5.1 When is Discretion Used?
   2. 5.2 Factors that Affect Discretion
   3. 5.3 Controlling Discretion
6. 6. Police Stress
   1. 6.1 Sources of Polices Stress
   2. 6.2 Consequences of Stress
   3. 6.3 Reactions to Stress
   4. 6.4 Two Types of Stress
   5. 6.5 Stress and Work Performance
   6. 6.6 Stress Prevention and Management

1. History of Police Selection

Definition of Police Selection: the process of selecting the right people (future officers) from a pool of applicants; this differs from Police Recruitment in that the primary goal of recruitment is to make policing interesting to the public enough to get them to come out to your booths.

This is achieved by screening out or screening in applicants:

• Screening Out: remove people from the pool that have undesirable characteristics/qualities. This is used more often because it’s easier to do. For example, it’s easy to screen out people with mental illnesses, biases and criminal records because they’re easily recognizable and verifiable characteristics.
• Screening In: selecting people from a pool that have desirable characteristics/qualities. Though this method is more desirable, it’s harder to define and measure. For example, you may want honest people with good decision-making skills but how do you define honest? How do you measure good-decision making skills?

Police Selection Procedures: over time, the ways we’ve selected officers has evolved:

• Beginning in 1917, the Californian police used standardized tests to assess their applicants – 80 for IQ and physically, they should be large males and slightly dumb (that’s what they needed at the time for their circumstances.)
• 1950 marked the first time that temperament tests were used in place of IQ tests; Humm and Humm used psych tests in LA to select police officers.
• From 1960-1970, psychological and psychiatric tests were becoming standard.
• Today, the procedures in which we select police officers may vary in the actual tests, but we all test the same stuff: medical exams, fitness tests, cognitive ability tests, personality assessments, etc.
  
  Fun Fact: in parts of Canada (he didn’t specify) there’s a serious staffing crisis among police officers. Anywhere between 50-75% of senior officers are set to retire in 5 years and Canada, in particular, is having a tough time transferring the knowledge of senior police officers to their younger counterparts.

2. Police Selection in Canada

Like mentioned in the last section, police selection in Canada tends to be the same across all agencies, with differences in the specific procedures they used, sometimes using home-grown procedures. For example, the RCMP uses polygraphs in their interviews (originally, that’s what they were doing, then they decided not to, now they are again) even if the NAS (National Association of Scholars) says it’s a bad idea (polygraphs aren’t reliable).

3. Police Selection Process

Police selection involves two stages:

1. Job Analysis: where the agency defines the KSAs (Knowledge, Skills and Abilities) that make up a good police officer.
   • Issues with KSAs: (deciding no performance measures) different players will have different ideas about which are most important (ex. your senior officer will value different qualities than your partner in the car). Further, people will disagree (in an interview, for example) how much you exhibit those KSAs (ex. “He’s so dreamy!” “Gross.”) (More on this in the Selection Interviews section)
2. Construction and Validation: where they construct a way to measure these KSAs and determine if the results validate the results for on-the-job performance (“We measured that he’d be honest; is he honest now that he’s on the job?”). This is also known as predictive validity.
   • Determining Predictive Validity: where we test them before and after and see if our results can predict their performance.
   • Issues with Predictive Validity: (range restriction) the results are skewed because of the lack of people we can test (not everyone gets to be an officer).
     In a perfect world, we’d test all recruits (pre-test) and get their post-evaluation follow-up (post-test) and determine the predictive validity of our instrument (how good it was at predicting the future). Unfortunately, we can’t accept all so we don’t get the breadth of results we need.

4. The Validity of Police Selection Instruments

4.1 Selection Interviews

Selection Interviews: an extremely common type of interview where officers determine if the applicant has the necessary KSAs. Here are some issues:

• Interviewer Disagreement: interviewers disagree on the ratings on various attributes.
• Faking Good: often people will present themselves in socially desirable ways (think of your last interview: how much did you make up hybrid truths in order to say what you thought they wanted to hear?) – how do we weed out the liars?
• Predictive Validity: research results are mixed.

4.2 Psychological Tests

Psych Tests: useful to determine whether a person possesses certain attributes.

• Cognitive Ability Tests: measures your aptitude (memory, logic, observation, comprehension) and are very common in Canada (ex. the RCMP uses the Police Aptitude Test)
  • Issue with Cognitive Ability Tests: moderate predictive validity – they tend to be better at predicting police academy performance rather than on-the-job performance.
• Personality Tests: measures your personality; here are a few common tests:
  • MMPI: good for screening out undesirable qualities (ex. schizophrenics and psychopaths) but doesn’t really help screen in the good ones. It also wasn’t developed for selecting officers.
  • IPI (Inwald Personality Inventory): this test was specifically designed for selecting officers and shows slight better predictive on-the-job performance results than the MMPI. Unfortunately, this is not used in Canada (mostly in the US).

4.3 Situational Tests

Situational Tests: tests designed to test police officers in a range of real-world situations; research suggests that these have moderate levels of predictive validity). These are mostly done at Assessment Centres.

In Conclusion, we’re bad at predicting because LIFE happens in between your pre- and post-tests and we can’t control for those factors (ex. marriage, kids).

5. Police Discretion

This section was not covered in class.

Police Discretion: where police officers must differentiate between circumstances that require absolute adherence to the law and circumstances that allow a bit of lenience. Here are some examples of why a police officer must exercise discretion:

• Some laws are not intended to be strictly enforced;
• Some laws are vague so officers need to think about when they must enforce them;
• Most violations are minor;
• Full enforcement of all laws would overwhelm the justice system and people would lose support from the public;
• Full enforcement is also impossible because of limited resources.

5.1 When is Discretion Used?

Police discretion must be used in the following 4 circumstances:

1. Youth Crime: officers have a great deal of discretion with the youth, primarily because it’s more beneficial to keep them away from serious offenders and because community-based interventions and family conferences are more desirable.
   • Resolution Conference: developed by the Sparwood youth Assistance Program (SYAP), the offender and victim come together to discuss: a) how the victim will be compensated; b) how to penalize the youth; c) provide support to the youth’s family; and d) establish a monitoring scheme to make sure everything is working.
2. Offenders with Mental Illnesses: officers normally have 3 choices:
   • Take the person to jail;
   • Take them to an institution; or
   • Resolve the matter informally.
   Unfortunately, officers normally have their hands tied and can’t take them to institutions because they don’t accept violent offenders.
3. Domestic Violence: before the 60s and 70s, domestic violence was often ignored; afterwards, arrests were more encouraged and now police officers can use mediation, community referrals (therapy) and separation to deal with the circumstances informally.
4. Use-of-Force Situations: police officers can only use the force that’s necessary to suppress a situation and only to the extent that is necessary to accomplish the goal. The amount of force used is often minimal and mostly due to a resistant offender.

5.2 Factors that Affect Discretion

The following are some factors that would influence when a police officer may arrest an offender:

• Evidence is strong and eyewitnesses are available.
• The victim and offender are strangers.
• The suspect is resistant or disrespectful to the officer.

5.3 Controlling Discretion

We use 2 methods to control police discretion:

1. Departmental Policies: in-house policies governing the use of force can effectively help prevent excessive use of force but senior management must be on board.
2. Use-of-Force Continuum: a model that outlines the level of force that’s acceptable given the offenders behaviour and other environmental circumstances (ex. lighting).

6. Police Stress

Let’s define stress first. Hans Seyle, the Father of Stress, defines it as:

Stress:

the automatic state that results when the body must makes changes in order to adapt to a demand.

Note: this definition doesn’t define whether the stress was caused by positive or negative circumstances (ex. a promotion vs. watching your partner die) but we do tend to focus on the negative aspects in research.

6.1 Sources of Polices Stress

There are four main sources of police stress:

1. Organizational: stressors that relate to the organization, such as lack of career development and excessive paperwork.
2. Occupational: stressors that relate to the job, such as irregular work schedules and human suffering.
3. Criminal Justice: stressors that relate to the justice system, such as ineffectiveness of the correction system and unfavourable court decisions.
4. Public: stressors that relate to the public interaction with police, such as distorted press accounts and public harassment.

6.2 Consequences of Stress

There are 3 major consequences of stress:

• Physical Health Problems
• Psychological and Personal Problems
• Job Performance Problems

6.3 Reactions to Stress

Selye’s 3-Stage Model (GAS – General Adaptation Syndrome): a model that measures how you react to stress.

• Alarm: intense arousal (fight or flight!).
• Resistance (Coping): where your body is actively trying to resist the stressors and attempts to adapt to it.
• Exhaustion: physical exhaustion – your body cannot cope with the demands of stress so you end up sick or (heart attacks, stroke, etc). (see lecture notes for graph)

6.4 Two Types of Stress

There are 2 categories of stress:

• Distress: stress characterized by emotion upset or physical strain.
• Eustress: stress characterized by pleasurable events (ex. athletes that are “in the zone”).
• This type of stress can help you invest more effort into preparing, work harder, focus your energy, and preserve yourself.

6.5 Stress and Work Performance

We examine the relationship between stress and work performance with police officers specifically to help them be effective (improve job performance). What’s been found is that the optimal circumstances are a moderate amount of stress (see lecture notes for graph); you need to be somewhere in between not caring at all and caring so much that you’re catatonic. (The amount of stress you can endure changes for each type of stressor – exams versus watching a murder.)

6.6 Stress Prevention and Management

You can moderate stress with ESP – Experience, Support and Personality.

• Prevention: this is a proactive strategy to teach you how to deal with future potential stressors.
• Management: this is a reactive strategy to help you deal with the stressor once it happens – this is used most often but is less advantageous).

Adaptive Coping Strategies – there are two ways we can approach coping strategies…

• Avoidant: where you deny and disengage (emotion focused). (Not as good)
• Active: where you remove the stressor (problem focused).

The purpose is to avoid maladaptive coping strategies. Adaptive coping strategies can not only improve job performance but also performance in all other aspects of your life (you learn to deal with stress better overall, not just in specific situations).