ENSURING officers step away from high pressure specialist jobs could be key in protecting their mental health.<\/p>\n
According to reports, Chelmsford Crown Court recently heard that officers had to seek counselling after being exposed to abhorrent images and videos during the investigation of a paedophile.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This sort of work, often unseen by the public, unsurprisingly can take its toll on investigators, says Essex Police Federation Chair Steve Taylor.<\/p>\n
He thinks giving officers the chance to step away from often mentally demanding roles could be beneficial.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s obviously an extremely challenging role,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do provide mental health surveillance and screening of them but in my view it\u2019s not something that they can or perhaps should do for a protracted amount of time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt affects them, it can take a real personal toll on them and they need rotating out because we all have a limited amount of time that we can spend investigating these sorts of matters \u2013 dealing with indecent images of children and the people who deal in them is, of course, one of the worst areas.\u201d<\/p>\n
He thinks the idea could be applied to other areas of policing too when \u2018stepping away\u2019 could be the best outcome for everyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are only so many road traffic accidents that colleagues can go to,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd when you\u2019ve reached your limit, you\u2019ve reached your limit. In these instances, the best thing is to support colleagues and identifying that they need to step away.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s something the public don\u2019t always appreciate, that officers are out there dealing with some of the worst things imaginable and it might not be easy to talk about, but we need to.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would encourage officers to realise when and what their limit is, if you are at the point of enough is enough, that you can\u2019t do it anymore then arguably you have gone too far already.<\/p>\n
\u201cTalk to your supervisor, the Federation, occupational health, there\u2019s no shame in realising there\u2019s a limited shelf life in what you can be exposed to.<\/p>\n
\u201cStepping away is sometimes the most professional thing you can do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ENSURING officers step away from high pressure specialist jobs could be key in protecting their mental health. According to reports, Chelmsford Crown Court recently heard that officers had to seek\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4588"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4619,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588\/revisions\/4619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}