Roads Policing Officers Need Focused Support

ROADS policing officers need specific support as they often attend traumatic incidents, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

Chairman Steve Kent said: “Every aspect of policing, especially frontline policing or police officers who involve themselves in the evidential chain, will always need some kind of recognition and awareness of the mental health strains that go with it.

“I’ve been a response cop all my service. I’ve had a very small period of working in roads policing, but what you do see with roads policing is they tend to see the catastrophic results of road accidents.

“They might not be dealing with quite the drip, drip, drip of response officers in terms of job to job to job to job, but when they go to a serious road accident it is catastrophic. They need different support, I think, to deal with that.”

Steve said the rise in single crewing added to the potential for mental health issues. He explained: “They haven’t got the ability to offload in the car afterwards. Traffic officers are going out in the car, nine times out of 10, on their own, and they don’t have that balance, they don’t have that sounding board.”

The force’s Trauma Risk Management (TRiM) process is good for helping officers after these incidents, Steve said, but it wasn’t triggered by every fatal incident.

He said: “An officer could go to a fatal incident every day for four or five days. They’re not going to get a TRiM procedure every time that happens and you never know what’s going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“So there needs to be more awareness. Maybe even if it’s a counsellor spending the morning with the team and saying, ‘I’m here if you want to speak to me’.”

This month the PFEW is focusing on the wellbeing of roads policing officers and family liaison officers, with Roads Policing Lead Gemma Fox saying: “The demands on this critical policing discipline and the toll it can take on officers’ mental health and wellbeing cannot be underestimated.”