By nature, police work is exhausting, stressful and sometimes traumatic. Tools and techniques to lessen the impact of those harms are often out of reach for smaller, more rural departments. That’s why Marion police hope to help officers balance their mental, physical and emotional well-being with an unlikely method: a smartphone application.
Police Chief John Clair said the focus on police health and wellness is relatively new. One of the earliest emphases on the subject, he said, came in 2015 in a report from the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and even then it seemed to be “tacked on” as an afterthought.
“Somehow, as a profession, we missed that happy, healthy cops make better cops,” the chief said.
Certain aspects of the job can take its toll on officers. Police often find themselves investigating terrible crimes, dealing with heart-wrenching domestic situations or responding to tragic events. While first responders are typically better equipped than the general public to tolerate a more vivid exposure to things like death and violence, Clair said certain situations can cause traumatic stress beyond their ability to cope without support.
He likened those events to placing a fire hose in a bucket. The harms endured exceed the officer’s capacity to cope almost immediately. Then there’s also what Clair called “daily drop” events, which take their toll more slowly.
“You hear about all these traumatic things that law enforcement sees,” Clair said. “Not just the hyper-violence—that’s one of the most traumatic things—but the small, daily traumas that are inflicted on law enforcement that then get internalized and it affects not only their work, but it affects their relationships and family lives.”
Some larger departments are able to offer things like work out facilities, training programs and seminars, or other resources to help officers cope with the harms that come with the job. The Marion PD has been working on a three-prong approach to meet those needs in a much smaller department. The app, Clair said, will help the department accomplish that.
“So how do we build resiliency?” he asked. “On a department our size with shifts of no more than three, four, five members of the department here on any one day at any one time, how do we do it? How do I connect with the department?”
The chief explained that the app, MagnusWorx, works by sending a periodic, anonymous “pulse” through officers’ smartphones, prompting the officers to answer a series of questions.
The answers to those questions do two things, Clair said. First, it prompts the app to curate targeted content, such as videos or articles pertaining to the needs of that officer in that moment. For example, if an officer is feeling fatigued, the app could generate a video created by a law enforcement peer who’s lived that experience and can offer realistic tips on how to address the fatigue.
“It’s not just some random person talking about stress and fatigue,” Clair said. “It’s a cop talking about it in context.”
The app also works to convey the overall well-being of the department to its leadership, allowing them to address any issues within their control.
“The answers are collected anonymously and communicated to me as a pulse, like ‘This is how your agency is feeling,’ ‘This is how much fatigue the agency is experiencing,’ ‘this is how much morale the agency is experiencing,’” Clair explained. “It’s not telling me who they are, it’s not giving me a ton of specifics, but it is giving me a general sense of how my agency is doing.”
Clair also believes the anonymity the app provides will make officers more comfortable expressing their concerns.
“They don’t have to come in here and say, ‘Hey chief, I’m having a really tough time and I’m not feeling well,’ because that’s hard for people to do, I don’t care who you are, but especially for cops,” Clair said.
Although he often tries to avoid the digital world, Clair said the MagnusWorx app first caught his attention at a Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police conference he attended last fall. He later took a leadership class taught by one of the conference’s speakers.
“And so, in putting all of those pieces together, I started to see that this isn’t just an app; this is an app that’s partnered with people who are legitimate trainers and thinkers and resiliency builders, and then there’s the leadership part of it too.”
A few weeks ago, officers received a test pulse from the app. Clair said he got a large amount of positive feedback in response.
“I’m going to be trying to push for active participation,” he said. “Obviously we can’t guarantee it and there will be people who don’t want to use it, but here’s what I think I know: People are looking up stuff on YouTube and on the internet all the time on how to help themselves, or self-help or problems that they’re dealing with, so I feel like there’s a chance it could be beneficial.”
In exchange for a department subscription to MagnusWorx, Clair has agreed to create content for the app to disseminate to officers across the country. His content will primarily focus on leadership issues.
The chief hopes to have the program rolled out within the next month. At that point, the Marion PD will become the program’s first Virginia subscribers.
In addition to MagnusWorx, the department also hopes to tackle the other two aspects of its three-prong approach by working with the Emory & Henry School of Health Sciences to help assess risks and hazards of the job, and by, at some point, securing diagnostic scan equipment to assess potential medical risks.
