Handbook of Police Psychology

Jack Kitaeff, Jack Kitaeff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429559136
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Angewandte Psychologie

The Handbook of Police Psychology features contributions from over 30 leading experts on the core matters of police psychology. The collection surveys everything from the beginnings of police psychology and early influences on the profession; to pre-employment screening, assessment, and evaluation; to clinical interventions.

Alongside original chapters first published in 2011, this edition features new content on deadly force encounters, officer resilience training, and police leadership enhancement. Influential figures in the field of police psychology are discussed, including America's first full-time police psychologist, who served in the Los Angeles Police Department, and the first full-time police officer to earn a doctorate in psychology while still in uniform, who served with the New York Police Department.

The Handbook of Police Psychology is an invaluable resource for police legal advisors, policy writers, and police psychologists, as well as for graduates studying police or forensic psychology.

1
Introduction and History of Police Psychology

Jack Kitaeff

The professions of policing, psychology, and police psychology have grown geometrically in the United States during the last 100 years. When American colonist Asser Levy and his brothers-in-arms served on the Burgher Guard in New Amsterdam (New York City) in 1657, they in essence became this country’s first policemen. Levy and his brethren could never imagine the current levels of technology and professionalism of modern police work and of the modern application of psychological principles to police work and law enforcement.

Today, psychology applied to policing, or police psychology, can broadly be defined as the application of psychological principles and methods to law enforcement. This broad and growing area includes topics such as screening and hiring police officers, conducting screenings for specials quads (e.g., SWAT), fitness-for-duty evaluations, investigations, hostage negotiations, training and consultation, and stress counseling, among others (Kitaeff, 2010).

Police Psychology: The Beginnings

Hugo Münsterberg is often called the first forensic psychologist. Yet in many ways he was also the first police psychologist because he wrote, at the beginning of the 20th century, how the law, the criminal investigator, the mechanisms of the courtroom, and the detection of criminals all came together under the watchful eye of the experimental psychologist. In his book On the Witness Stand (1908), Münsterberg talked about many topics such as illusions, the memory of witnesses, the effects of emotions, untrue confessions, the suggestibility of witnesses, hypnosis, and crime prevention. But it was perhaps his work on the detection of crime (and hence the use of primitive “criminal profiling” and “hypnosis”) that stands out as the forerunners of the modern tools of the same names that have been used by police psychologists during the last 100 years. Münsterberg said:

The psychologist who seeks to discover the secret connections of ideas may thus, by his association method, not only protect the innocent and unmask the guilty, but bring health and strength to the nervous wreck.

Yet our chief interest belongs to the legal aspect of this method [free association and hypnosis]. Carried out with the skill which only long laboratory training can give, it has become, indeed, a magnifying-glass for the most subtle mental mechanism, and by it the secrets of the criminal mind may be unveiled. All this has, of course, no legal standing to-day, and there is probably no one who desires to increase the number of “experts” in our criminal courts. But justice demands that truth and lies be disentangled. The time will come when the methods of experimental psychology cannot longer be excluded from the court of law. It is well known that the use of stenographers in trials once met with vehement opposition, while now the shorthand record of the court procedure seems a matter of course.

The help of the psychologist will become not less indispensable. The vulgar ordeals of the “third degree” in every form belong to the Middle Ages, and much of the wrangling of attorneys about technicalities in admitting the “evidence” appears to not a few somewhat out of date, too: the methods of experimental psychology are working in the spirit of the twentieth century. The “third degree” may brutalize the mind and force either correct or falsified secrets to light; the time-measurement of association is swifter and cleaner, more scientific, more humane, and more reliable in bringing out the truth which justice demands.

Of course, we are only at the beginning of its development; the new method is still in many ways imperfect, and if clumsily applied it may be misleading; moreover, there exists no hard and fast rule which fits every case mechanically. But all this indicates only that, just as the bodily facts have to be examined by the chemist or the physiologist, the mental facts must be examined also, not by the layman, but by the scientific psychologist, with the training of a psychological laboratory.

(1908, pp. 109–110)

Police Psychology: The Early Years

Other early psychologists who influenced the fledgling field of police psychology included William Stern, Alfred Binet, and Lewis Terman. William Stern (1912) decided that “personalistic psychology” or “individuality” was destined to be the main psychological problem of the 20th century. He attempted to classify people according to types, norms, and aberrations. To Stern, it was in the process of investigating individuality that the real essence of personality and intelligence could be discovered. Stern was influenced by the work of Alfred Binet and his studies of intelligence in children. As a result, Stern reviewed the principle findings in the field and developed the idea of expressing intelligence test results in the form of a single number, the intelligence quotient.

While Terman’s (1916) study was the first to suggest that testing using the Stanford-Binet was useful for pre-employment evaluations, his results lacked information about the actual criterion-related validity of the Stanford-Binet for the specific purpose of police officer selection. However, Terman did feel that testing would one day be valuable as a selection tool for certain types of occupations and stressed the importance of establishing correlations between test scores and future performance, and in establishing norms of performance for different occupational groups. While Terman’s study was speculative and did not involve the kinds of personality tests used in law enforcement selection today, he was a forerunner for using these evaluations as a means of obtaining the needed research data to make such evaluations viable (Inwald, 1990, 1992).

In the early 1920s, a few experimental investigations of psychological testing on police attitude and performance were conducted. For example, in 1922, L. L. Thurstone gave the Army Alpha Intelligence test to a group of officers serving in the Detroit Police Department. He found that, in general, patrolmen scored higher than the lieutenants who commanded them. Thurstone concluded that this may have been due to the fact that the most intelligent law enforcement officers often moved out of police work altogether to other, higher paying occupations rather than waiting for promotions that took too long to come or never came at all. Kates (1950) administered the Rorschach inkblot test (Klopfer scoring system) to a group of New York City police officers and found that some Rorschach variables could be used to predict job satisfaction and motivation for promotion.

In the 1950s, psychology became increasingly utilized in many areas beyond testing and classification in the military, and this included increased involvement in police work of various sorts and to various degrees. During World War II and the Korean War, psychologists were employed by the military service to assist Selective Service Boards in identifying individuals who were psychologically unfit for military service. In addition, they became involved in conducting evaluations for the purposes of selecting spies, saboteurs, and intelligence operatives ( Janik, 1990). Most notable in this area was the work of Henry Murray and colleagues, who used personality assessment instruments to perform personnel selection evaluations for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. Success in these areas quickly expanded to postwar civilian life.

In 1954, Martin Reiser became the nation’s first full-time police psychologist, when he began screening all applicants to the Los Angeles Police Department using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a group Rorschach, a tree drawing, and a brief psychiatric interview (Blau & Super, 1997). A date that further stands out in importance for police psychology is 1972, when Martin Reiser presented a paper titled The Police Department Psychologist at the Western Psychological Association Convention. Reese (1987a, 1987b), a historian on psychological services to police and law enforcement, has estimated that only six police agencies in the United States had full-time psychologists prior to 1977. The same had not been true in Europe, however, where police departments in Germany were using psychologists in a variety of capacities as early as 1919. In 1966, the Munich police were employing a full-time police psychologist to train officers to deal with various patrol situations, such as crowd control.

In 1958, Harvey Schlossberg (shield number 16844) became a patrolman with the New York City Police Department. As he was in college at the time and contemplating attending graduate school, he felt that this might be a job in which he could earn money while he attended to his studies. He didn’t know a lot about what the police job entailed but heard they were recruiting, so he figured he would give it a try. He learned that he would have to attend an academy where he would learn how to shoot a pistol. Most of all, he knew that he would get paid a salary during this time. He could never have imagined back then that he would remain with the police department for 20 years (Kitaeff, 2006a).

In his book Psychologist With a Gun, Schlossberg (1974) recounts the first time he wore his police uniform home. His mother didn’t even recognize him. He didn’t even recognize himself when he looked in the mirror. He knew one thing: With that uniform, his badge, and his gun, he felt different. “The first day I wore the uniform of a cop I felt taller than usual” (p. 29). After earning his bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College, Schlossberg went on for his master’s degree at C.W. Post College and his doctorate at Yeshiva University. In 1971, Harvey Schlossberg became the first known police officer in the United States to earn a doctorate in psychology while still a full-time police officer in uniform.

In 1972, when Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy heard that one of his officers (a detective by then) had earned a doctorate in psychology, he asked Harvey Schlossberg to design a police psychological service unit. In many ways, Schlossberg can be considered the father of modern police psychology in the United States.

In Psychologist With a Gun, Schlossberg (1974) outlined his thoughts for establishing a psychological services unit within the police department (the second in the country after Martin Reiser established his with the Los Angeles Police Department). But Reiser was a psychologist, not a police officer. Schlossberg was both—a very important distinction. He listed the services this new psychological services unit would provide. They included:

1. The conducting of psychological evaluations, consisting of psychological testing.
2. Psychiatric interviews, diagnosis, and prognosis, all in an attempt to discover if certain policemen sent to [him] by their superiors or coming to [his] office voluntarily were too emotionally upset to be allowed to carry a gun. If they were found to be, then either short-term or long-term therapy would be recommended and an attempt made to find psychiatrists to treat them.
3. Marriage counseling, where marital problems impaired a policeman’s work.
4. Guidance and counseling to police who had minor problems.
5. Referral of families, wives, or children for treatment if they needed it.
6. Psychological testing and evaluation of candidates for promotion.
7. Psychological testing and evaluation of all recruits.
8. Research and operational consultations to other units within the department for personnel selection and research into function.
9. Instructional services to promotion classes on recognition of psychiatric problems commonly encountered by supervisors.
10. Continued administration of a pilot program for certain officers who needed therapy, which would include referral, payment, and supervision of the therapeutic process.
11. Maintaining of liaison with the honorary psychiatrists who served the Medical Division as consultants.
12. Acting as consultant to the district surgeons on psychological matters concerning members of the force.
13. Conducting of special lectures on psychological problems related to special police functions.
14. Representing the department on psychological matters in lectures before lay and professional organizations.
15. Consultant on behavioral patterns in crime situations.
16. Teaching of specialized courses for department units.
17. Acting as liaison with civilian psychiatrists and psychologists and as advisor to them on special problems relating to the demands of police work. (p. 93)

In the psychological screening of police recruits, Schlossberg instituted an assessment battery that included a structured clinical interview along with the administration of certain psychological tests. These tests included the Thorndike Dimensions of Temperament Scale, the Cornell Medical Index (CMI), the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), and the House-Tree-Person Test (H-T-P) (Kitaeff, 2006b).

The Thorndike Dimensions of Temperament Scale was originally published in 1966 and was a self-report inventory through which the individual describes himself with respect to 10 dimensions of temperament: Sociable, Ascendant, Cheerful, Placid, Accepting, Tough-Minded, Reflective, Impulsive, Active, and Responsible.

The Cornell Medical Index (CMI) was created in 1949 and was a self-administered health questionnaire developed to obtain details of the person’s medical history as an adjunct to the medical interview. It consisted of 195 questions divided into 18 sections; the first 12 sections dealt with somatic complaints, and the last six with mood and feeling patterns.

The Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS) was developed in 1959 based on the “manifest need system” theory of H. A. Murray and his associates at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Beginning with 15 needs drawn from Murray’s list of manifest needs, Edwards prepared sets of items whose content appeared to fit each need. Examples included the need for achievement (to do one’s best and accomplish something difficult), deference (to conform to what is expected), exhibition (to be the center of attention), intraception (to analyze the motives and feelings of oneself and others), dominance (to influence others and to be regarded as a leader), and nurturance (to help others in trouble).

The original Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed in the late 1930s by a psychologist and a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota. The test had 10 clinical scales and three validity scales plus various supplementary scales. The clinical scales were intended to distinguish groups of people with psychiatric disorders that have somewhat exotic-sounding names such as hysteria, psychopathic deviate, and p...