Six Newark, NJ, residents and five police officers sit in a semi-circle in a local community center. They’re listening as a Black man, mid forties, recounts a tale of being hit in the head by a police officer as a teenager while hanging out with his friends after school. As he finishes his story, he leans back, arms crossed, anger present as if the beating had occured yesterday.
An officer from across the room speaks. “I know I wasn’t the officer that was there that day, but I wanted to apologize for what happened to you.”
A shift occurs in the room. The middle-aged man’s arms unfold, his frown loosens, and tears begin to flow.
“That’s trauma,” says a different officer. He, like the other 10 people in the room, knows much more about trauma — what it is, how it shows up — having spent hours in Equal Justice USA’s Trauma to Trust.
The program spans two days, eight hours each day, and brings together community members and law enforcement officers for an intimate workshop that aims to help both sides understand what trauma is and how it operates in community and police interaction.
The big picture goal is to help police identify and respond appropriately to trauma in their daily interactions with community members. We call it “trauma-informed policing.” When it’s successful, police are better equipped to create safety from the very first interaction they have with an individual.
These trainings have been taking place in Newark since 2015. The mayor and police leadership want the entire police department to be “trauma-informed.” The effect of the training is evident when police understand why a 30-year-old event, like the one recounted above, triggers such a strong reaction from community members. The impact of the training occurs when an officer realizes that an apology is due, even if they were not the person who directly caused the harm. Trauma to Trust is about behavior change that can come from understanding trauma.
Our aim is to change the relationship between community and law enforcement in order to truly create cities that are just and safe. We do that through teaching officers about the history of policing in Black and Brown communities, about how trauma shows up in the body and particularly in perpetually policed communities, about the secondary trauma impacts police officers themselves, as well as strategies and techniques for healing trauma.
At Equal Justice USA, we believe that true justice equals safety, healing, and accountability that repairs. Acknowledging harm and its resulting trauma can put an end to the cyclical model of our current criminal legal system that causes more harm by focusing solely on punishment. Trauma-informed policing is one element used to address this transformation in our approach to safety and justice.
What is Trauma?
Trauma results from one or more events, or set of circumstances, experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful, threatening, or shocking. The event or circumstances have lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, spiritual, or other varying aspects of a person’s general well-being. Seventy-one percent of adults have experienced some form of victimization and trauma in some capacity. When compounded with other sociological factors — like poverty, racism, and mental health struggles, all of which inflict trauma — that number increases.
Training police to interact with community members with the assumption that they have experienced trauma can help to eliminate re-traumatIzation or unnecessary harm. For individuals in high-stress situations, such as being stopped by a police officer, trauma can show up in three ways:
- Flight — the desire to run or avoid engagement — A trauma-informed approach does not assume this behavior is an admission of guilt. Instead, it’s viewed as potentially a natural response to a stressful situation.
- Freeze — the forgetting of important details of a situation, an inability to focus, or tuning out a conversation. On the surface, a police officer could read these behaviors cas hostile or uncooperative, when they are normal responses to trauma or stress. When officers read them as trauma responses, they can respond accordingly and not cause further trauma for the individual.
- Fight — hostile behavior, including widened eyes or increasingly angry or irate speech. By viewing “fight” indicators with trauma in mind, officers can help alleviate the immediate threats causing these behaviors and help bring citizens back to a more centered, present state.
Like other universal protocols, such as wearing gloves when handling blood, officers behaving in a trauma-informed manner when engaging with citizens can mitigate conflict, excessive force, and other traumatic behaviors exhibited by police. While there will always be police officers with ill intentions and tendencies toward harm — even when seeded by trauma they themselves once experienced — teaching law enforcement to consider and respond appropriately to trauma creates the possibility of changing culture for long-lasting progress.
How does trauma-informed policing different from other attempts at police reform?
Trauma-informed policing trains officers to recognize trauma responses and how they show up in individuals.
Police can acknowledge trauma-induced behaviors through some simple practices. For example, they can provide water and space for individuals to breathe once they are safely constrained, or they can offer information and context for a person who is triggered when it is safe to do so. This produces an added benefit, as officers have a better environment in which to do their job and build safety
The results in Newark speak for themselves. Since 2016, the Newark Police Division has been a regular participant in community-driven public safety roundtables to discuss safety measures and understand community concerns. Citizen complaints against officers has shown a demonstrable decrease. And in 2020, Newark police did not fire a single shot. Social workers are now employed alongside police officers to cases that require additional supports. Community-based organizations in Newark are proactively providing resources and services to individuals who have experienced harm to prevent retaliation, recidivism, and to reduce crimes of necessity. These and other fundamental shifts in policing are what it means to be trauma-informed. While we know that there is no one, quick solution for creating safety, we recognize that addressing trauma lies at the heart of the solution.
