Progress Report #2
(INTRO) Two years, two officer involved shootings, two suspects dead, and a community upinarms, post Rodney King protests, claiming it was a racially motivated killing. This was the nightmare Officer Paul Smith, of the Madison Police Department, found himself in during the spring of 1994. Even though he had been cleared of all wrong doings for both of the shootings, the community he had sworn to protect was turning against him. Not long after, Officer Smith started showing signs of PTSD by isolating himself, drinking to fall asleep, and thinking “If I had been a better officer, that wouldn't have happened that way.”#9 Mark Baker, author of Cops: Their Lives in Their Own Words, put it into words when he said, “Finally, a …show more content…
In 2006 Goerling contacted Brant Rogers about setting up a yoga for cops stating, “I want you to help figure out a way to stop the hurting.” Over the next few years Goerling and Rodgers began looking into the “work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in the 70’s developed an evidence-based program of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction involving meditation and yoga.” #13 This then transitioned into the 2013 study at Pacific University in Oregon called “Mindfulness-Based Resilience Training” that they completed with psychology professor, Michael Christopher. During this training they took officers through an eight-week program learning mindfulness and self-care techniques. The post surveys concluded that officers “reported feeling less burned out and better equipped to deal with stressful situations, both at work and at home. They also felt a heightened state of awareness when awake and consistently logged longer, higher-quality periods of sleep.” #13 These studies laid the groundwork for Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, at the Center for Healthy Minds in Madison, Wisconsin. Davidson and Dan Grupe, the project leader. They partnered up with the Madison Police Department, a nationally recognized longtime leader in police reform, to test if a mindfulness-based practice could improve the mental health of it’s officers. Grupe was quoted saying, “If you have a high-stress population like police officers, you can look at baseline measurements and then, knowing that there’s a pretty high likelihood that they’ll be exposed to some sort of traumatic event, follow them over time to compare the before and after.” The pilot study took two groups of fifteen officers, already interested in mindfulness techniques, through an eight week training based on the previous study in 2013. Some of the techniques taught in this training was “breath meditation (consciously inhaling and exhaling at a steady pace) and mindful
(INTRO) Two years, two officer involved shootings, two suspects dead, and a community upinarms, post Rodney King protests, claiming it was a racially motivated killing. This was the nightmare Officer Paul Smith, of the Madison Police Department, found himself in during the spring of 1994. Even though he had been cleared of all wrong doings for both of the shootings, the community he had sworn to protect was turning against him. Not long after, Officer Smith started showing signs of PTSD by isolating himself, drinking to fall asleep, and thinking “If I had been a better officer, that wouldn't have happened that way.”#9 Mark Baker, author of Cops: Their Lives in Their Own Words, put it into words when he said, “Finally, a …show more content…
In 2006 Goerling contacted Brant Rogers about setting up a yoga for cops stating, “I want you to help figure out a way to stop the hurting.” Over the next few years Goerling and Rodgers began looking into the “work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in the 70’s developed an evidence-based program of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction involving meditation and yoga.” #13 This then transitioned into the 2013 study at Pacific University in Oregon called “Mindfulness-Based Resilience Training” that they completed with psychology professor, Michael Christopher. During this training they took officers through an eight-week program learning mindfulness and self-care techniques. The post surveys concluded that officers “reported feeling less burned out and better equipped to deal with stressful situations, both at work and at home. They also felt a heightened state of awareness when awake and consistently logged longer, higher-quality periods of sleep.” #13 These studies laid the groundwork for Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, at the Center for Healthy Minds in Madison, Wisconsin. Davidson and Dan Grupe, the project leader. They partnered up with the Madison Police Department, a nationally recognized longtime leader in police reform, to test if a mindfulness-based practice could improve the mental health of it’s officers. Grupe was quoted saying, “If you have a high-stress population like police officers, you can look at baseline measurements and then, knowing that there’s a pretty high likelihood that they’ll be exposed to some sort of traumatic event, follow them over time to compare the before and after.” The pilot study took two groups of fifteen officers, already interested in mindfulness techniques, through an eight week training based on the previous study in 2013. Some of the techniques taught in this training was “breath meditation (consciously inhaling and exhaling at a steady pace) and mindful