Today’s title is Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Kevin M. Gilmartin, Ph.D. This book was recommended to me by a police officer buddy of mine, and he told me it was absolutely essential reading material for anybody working in the field or wanting to. After reading it, I have to agree.
Gilmartin was an officer himself for many years and has devoted himself to the special study of police psychology. The premise of the book is that departments spend vast amounts of resources teaching their employees “street survival” skills, but almost completely neglect the necessity of teaching officers how to emotionally thrive in a job that has a suicide rate three times higher than that of the general population. The book accurately describes how and why police officers become cynical, unmotivated, self-perceived victims, and goes on to give strategies for overcoming this tendency.
As I mentioned in my review of Conlon’s book, after reading Emotional Survival I went back through and saw to my amazement that Gilmartin had very accurately described Conlon’s first few years on the job. Conlon’s personal life is girlfriend to girlfriend and he finds himself rooming with and spending the majority of his personal time with other cops. He has epic struggles with oppressive, unjust, and incompetent superiors that take every ounce of joy and motivation out of him. He finds himself assigned to sifting through the wreckage of the World Trade Center day after day, with no end in sight. Conlon deals with these things in his own unique way, but Gilmartin traces the symptoms of failure to thrive emotionally and shows us that Conlon clearly could have benefited immensely from some training in emotional survival.
Emotional Survival is an easy read thanks to Gilmartin’s conversational style and contains information that I would consider vital to any person desiring to work or currently working in Law Enforcement. His analysis is legitimate, extremely practical, and uncannily accurate, and even as a recruit without any time on the job of my own I gleaned a great deal of valuable information that I hope to put to good use some day soon.
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