Police members have very little in the way of psychological support despite frequent brushes with death and horrifying incidents Tracey Farren Captain Clifford Wyethe of Kirstenhof police station near Cape Town ticks off his experiences of the past three days. On Wednesday a prison warder was knocked down on the N3 – it was his job to inform the family. On Thursday he was called on to the scene minutes after two men gunned a man down in his lounge. On Friday he counselled the parents of a four-year-old who had been abducted by a paedophile. He coped well with the first two cases, but the third one disturbed him terribly. The little girl was exactly the same age as his granddaughter and he came away “fuming mad”. He says: “I will lie awake thinking about it … It will be in my mind forever.” The South African Police Service offers little support for people like Wyethe. There is a maximum of nine psychologists/psychiatrists in the service who are qualified to give therapy to the nation’s 140 000 members. Four of them are in managerial positions and taken up with other duties. The police social workers are also impossibly overloaded.
Magda Laubscher of Social Work Services in Pretoria says that there is one social worker to every 1 200 members. In total there are 173 social workers to debrief police members after particularly horrifying incidents, to unravel family problems and to run proactive programmes like “suicide prevention” and “stress management”. “Colleague sensitivity” is another such programme, but a police psychologist who asked not to be named says that the system is not working. She says that the debriefing teams “don’t get referred much”. Police managers responsible for referring their staff for counselling are essentially crime fighters. They do not have the time to pay attention to the their staff’s state of mind. She says that rather than rely on referral “it should be an automatic thing that, after a bad incident, debriefing happens within 48 hours”. Counselling for critical incident stress works best during this period, but the person responsible for referral often does not hear of the incident until long afterwards.
A sergeant at the CR Swart police station in Durban says the only guidance he has received in the past eight years is the anti-suicide poster on the wall of the charge office. He has heard that there is some sort of chaplain and a social worker on the sixth floor, but they have never introduced themselves to the members downstairs and he says he has absolutely no idea what they do. He says: “We see things like dead bodies, burnt bodies and foetuses … but management do not offer us help.” The police service has so far defended itself in the media by saying that members are referred to private practitioners for psychological help. The help is severely limited, however. Polmed, the service’s medical association, has cut its limit for psychological/psychiatric consultation to R1 200 a family a year. This amounts to less than five sessions a family a year. Successful post-traumatic stress counselling requires two year’s worth of weekly sessions. Polmed’s limit for chronic psychiatric medication is also unrealistically low. Alcohol is a convenient alternative.
The police psychologist says: “Police canteens sell cheaper booze than outside … and alcohol helps to dull the nightmares.” Many police members admit to drinking heavily to relieve tension. Their frustration sometimes spills over into violence on the job, but members are wary of the attention of the Independent Complaints Directorate.
Competition for promotion in the police is fierce and reports of unnecessary force jeopardise their chances of promotion. Their pent-up stress is most likely to find its way out at home. Inspector Edgar Jones of Grassy Park police station in Cape Town says that they deal with more than 45 complaints a day, most of them involving violence. “We see the effects of pipe bombs, gang wars and violent rape … then we go home and take it out on ourselves, our wives and our children.”
Agatha Jacobs of Grassy Park says that police also use humour as an emotional shield. She adds: “But the joking and the drinking doesn’t work. It helps for a moment, but the stress stays with them.” Police members and helping professionals alike claim that the culture of machismo typical of the old police force is dissipating. Members are more prepared than ever before to show their vulnerability. Captain Dyson Jacobs, the communications officer at Mitchells Plain police station says the station sometimes receives in excess of 600 complaints over the weekend, most of them serious – “like murder, attempted murder and armed robbery”. He says it is the responsibility of the officer in charge of particularly gruesome cases to ask the other members whether they want counselling. “There is still a strong ‘cowboys don’t cry’ ethic, but sometimes they accept.”
A fear of non-confidentiality, however, seems to override the positive change in ethos. Members worry that treatment for stress will threaten their careers. Structural and staff changes have created a sense of insecurity among members and, as Inspector Marius Voges of Muizenburg says: “If you want to be promoted, you’ve got to prove that you’re better than the next guy.” Voges tells of how a fellow policeman has terrible nightmares after arriving on the scene of a car that had burst into flames. The man in the car begged him to take his wife out first and the policeman was forced to hold her back while they watched her husband burn. He did not request counselling in case he was thought to lack the mettle for a more reponsible position, with its concomitant rise in salary. The sergeant from CR Swart asks angrily: “Who is going to ask for help? We are scared to book off for stress or depression. I rather book off for a long illness, like bronchitis.” Captain Joshua Jacobs of Kirstenhof says that it is even worse for the higher-ranking officers. “You have to show your strength. If you crack and book off for stress … they will think that you can’t be a leader.” Although police-helping professionals are bound to a code of confidentiality, members say that the word gets out and their supervisors include issues of mental strain on their promotion forms. The police psychologist who chose to speak out says: “The fact that they’ve seen a psychologist or psychiatrist will count against them.” She points out that police trauma would be more bearable if it was experienced in the context of support. “The changing systems, the devaluation of the police in the eyes of society, their experience of not being listened to or valued as a human being, even their financial difficulties, create a snowball effect – the stress impinges from all over.” Police members confirm this, saying they feel they are fighting on three fronts. One constable explains that the public do not understand when they have only one vehicle to attend to a large, crime-ridden area. The public complains to police seniors who, in turn, command them to provide a better service. He says: “All the time we are fighting crime, management and the public!” Many believe that complaints about stress are likely to elicit an unsympathetic response from their seniors. One sergeant comments: “Management have their own seniors breathing down their necks and they will say something like, ‘If you don’t like your job, no one’s making you stay!'”
It seems that while police members are becoming increasingly humble about needing help, circumstances often force them to keep their trauma to themselves, despite their daily exposure to haunting images and their frequent brushes with death.