WHEN MOST PEOPLE hear the word sabbatical what comes to mind is well-paid university professors on an extended break, reading and writing, perhaps, in a relaxed setting far from the everyday responsibilities of campus life.
One image the term certainly doesn’t evoke is that of pistol-packing police officers taking time away from patrol duties. But if we take seriously the idea of sabbaticals as a valuable break from the demands of daily work life and a time to recharge before returning, rejuvenated, to that routine, there may be no other group for whom the restorative power of a well-planned sabbatical makes more sense.
Policing is one of the most stress-filled jobs in society, and the toll it takes on officers is well-documented. It is seen in higher rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse, divorce and other outcomes that also impact officers’ families. The stress can also play out in police interaction with the public.
With that knowledge, shouldn’t we be doing all we can to improve the well-being of those in one of the most vital public service roles in society — men and women charged with protecting us, who can be called on at any instant to make sudden life and death decisions?
The idea of mid-career police officers studying emotional self-awareness and getting trained in meditation practice may not fit our idea of stern-faced cops. But for their sake and ours, it makes eminent sense for us to consider the idea of sabbaticals for police.
A 2024 state-of-the-industry survey of officers nationwide underscores the troubled state of officer wellness:
- Nearly a quarter of respondents had called themselves out of service due to out-of-the-ordinary sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, hunger, or emotional distress, and a third had considered doing so.
- 76 percent of respondents cited “lack of time” due to work or personal commitments as the biggest barrier to maintaining or improving their health, highlighting the need for better support systems.
- Over half of respondents said a stigma still exists around seeking mental health services. And 12 percent of officers reported having no access to mental health resources.
At the root of much of the stress police officers experience, and the cascade of negative effects it produces, is their extraordinary susceptibility to a phenomenon known as hypervigilance.
Hypervigilance is a heightened sense of peril brought on by constant potential risk. Being attuned to risk “is a basic human survival mechanism,” says psychologist Susan Albers of the Cleveland Clinic. “It allows us to sense predators and threats to our safety. But with hypervigilance, you feel like you’re constantly under threat.” In other words, says a Cleveland Clinic explainer on hypervigilance, the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that manages emotions, “is on overdrive.”
Families can experience the secondary effects of hypervigilance when officers are not trained to disengage when the shift is over. Consider a story once related to me by Massachusetts police officer.
Few of us view the supermarket as an especially dangerous place. But this officer explained how, after a dozen years on a job characterized by continuous potential risk, he carried hypervigilance with him during activities as seemingly innocuous as a supermarket trip with his kids. He established a safety protocol for his children in the unlikely event that they were confronted by someone he had arrested in the past. He taught the kids to head to designated safe spots in the store if they heard the code word he taught them that activated the plan. They reviewed the protocol whenever they accompanied him to the store.
The probability of danger in the cereal aisle is low. I don’t know of any officer who was ever attacked while off-duty in the supermarket by someone they had previously arrested. So why was this police officer on high alert while engaged in such a quotidian errand? Regardless of the very low probability of such a perilous encounter, unmanaged biological and emotional stress caused a father to teach his children that the grocery store is a potentially dangerous place.
The officer’s tale is more than mere anecdote. In a 2020 national survey of 1,355 US police officers, 47 percent of respondents met the screening standard for PTSD, a rate almost 10 times the prevalence of the condition in the general population, while 29 percent suffered from moderate to severe anxiety, two times the general population prevalence, and 37 percent reported suffering from moderate to severe depression, five times the prevalence in general population.
The survey found that particularly “troubling patterns emerged for officers who identified as being 5 to 10 years into their career in law enforcement.” This group was at higher risk for PTSD and depression than officers who were less than five years or more than 10 years into their career. At that point, the enthusiasm of the new recruit has waned, and the cumulative toll of stresses of the job are building. It’s the same period in which upswings are seen in suicide, divorce, and substance abuse. After 10 years, officers appear to have created some coping mechanisms on their own.
Potential risk cannot be filtered out of the police job. Nor can we entirely rewire the human brain. But we can and must help police officers better manage the negative effects of their job. Implementation of sabbaticals at key points in an officer’s career would be a major step forward in this effort, providing a break from the debilitating loop of hypervigilance and a chance for officers to regain balance that will benefit their work performance and personal lives.
Sabbaticals for academic faculty started at Harvard in 1880. The idea comes from the Jewish concept of the sabbath, or shabbat, as a time of rest every seven days. Most universities today provide faculty the opportunity to apply for a sabbatical every seven years for either a full year (sometimes at half pay) or half year.
Writing on the health news website STAT, Diana Mason, a professor at the George Washington University School of Nursing, argued for a sabbatical program for nurses, who are subject to stressors similar to those experienced by police. In 2021, she wrote, an estimated 10 percent of non-academic businesses provided paid sabbaticals and nearly 30 percent offered unpaid breaks.
A sabbatical initiative for police may seem like be so much blue-sky dreaming. But every reform that has made officers and communities safer, starting with the establishment of full-time police departments 180 years ago, has seemed impractical at the outset. Many practitioners believed that criminal investigations would be rendered ineffective after the US Supreme Court, in its 1961 ruling in Mapp v. Ohio, created the exclusionary rule, making inadmissible any evidence gathered outside the scope of a search warrant. Instead, the ruling compelled major improvements in the quality of investigations.
A sabbatical program would give police officers a predictable and meaningful break from the cycle of hypervigilance. If properly planned and programmed, months off at certain key milestones in a police career will provide officers a needed opportunity to refresh and renew. Paired with routine hypervigilance debriefs, on a monthly or quarterly basis, sabbaticals can be a critical part of program of effective emotional, mental, and physical hygiene.
The idea of police sabbaticals is just beginning to be discussed by police executives. The police department in Citrus Heights, California, employs a version of sabbaticals, giving officers a consecutive block of four weeks off each year in place of paid holidays. The only US department known to have adopted the more traditional concept of a sabbatical is the 10-member police force in the small city of Paynesville, Minnesota.
Chief Paul Wegner initiated a sabbatical program there last year, saying he knows from his own experience that taking one or two weeks off rarely gives an officer the feeling of being fully rejuvenated. The new policy will give officers a four-week paid sabbatical, to be taken in one block of time between their fifth and sixth year of service. It will not count against their regular accrued time off.
“It’s not the big things, critical incidents that burn people out,” Wegner said in a 2022 interview. “It’s compounding stress from the ‘every day’ that burns up and burns out officers. Burnout brings fatigue, numbness, cynicism.”
Such corrosion of officers’ emotional response can lead to justification for wrongdoing, from neglecting duties to use of excessive force. To some police officers, the community, police department administrators, and elected officials become a malevolent “them,” outside forces who don’t understand what they endure. Officers come to think of themselves as justified in misconduct by identifying as victims.
Sabbaticals for Massachusetts police officers could help unwind the stress of hypervigilance. Here is a model with which we might begin the conversation.
The program would be provided at two key points in the police career: a three-month respite at seven years on the job and six months at 15 years. The Commonwealth should play a role in funding such an initiative and designing its content. The state could create a statewide sabbatical academy and retreat center.
It could offer a curriculum of restorative studies and activities for police officers at the start of the sabbatical period. The formal program would consist of four eight-hours days. How to spend the majority of the time would be up to the officers.
Services could include:
- Physical fitness assessments
- Nutrition advice
- Mental and physical health services resources and referrals
- Addiction recovery resources and referrals
Among the physical activities could be:
- Walking
- Jogging
- Weightlifting
- Martial arts
- Boxing
- Varieties of meditation
- Relaxation techniques
Classroom subjects might include:
- Emotional self-awareness and survival
- Implicit bias and decision-making
- Leadership
- How to navigate internal departmental stressors
The financial costs of a sabbatical program would be considerable. Departments likely would be required to add officers in order to maintain full staffing during sabbaticals. Filling shifts with personnel on overtime would be less expensive but undermine the purpose of the program; working excessive hours on overtime and private detail shifts is part of the problem.
Modifications to existing labor agreements would require a lot of hard work at the bargaining table. The pay increases associated with so-called education credits could be on the table. It’s common knowledge that a lot of degrees that qualify for increased salary are drive-by credits awarded from diploma mills. Most officers could teach the courses that lead to master’s degrees. Union members may have to consider whether it’s worth trading the education salary bump for a shot at a healthier, more balanced life.
David Couper, the retired police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, and a well-known police reformer, recently described the benefits he received from a self-initiated sabbatical.
Nearly 20 years into his policing career and eight years after becoming police chief in Madison, “I was burned out. I was fighting the union, integrating the department, implementing problem-oriented and community policing and the stress was mounting,” Couper wrote on his blog “Improving Police.” At home, he added, his marriage was falling apart with his wife also feeling the stress he was under.
“I needed to get healthy — maybe even reinvent myself. I separated from my marriage and asked the mayor for a six-month (and unpaid) leave of absence,” he wrote. “He graciously agreed and I took off with a loan from the city’s credit union. I travelled, wrote poetry, skied in the mountains, and visited life-long friends. I came back after three months, rejuvenated.”
“Today, sabbatical time is enjoyed by university professors and clergy,” wrote Couper. “It is now time to implement paid sabbaticals for our police,” he said, arguing it will “add to the health and betterment of our society.”
Sabbaticals won’t be a cure-all for the workplace challenges police face, but they hold great potential. A pilot program in Massachusetts to design, implement, and evaluate such programs is a sensible first step, one that police officers and the community should both get behind.
Jim Jordan is the retired director of strategic planning at the Boston Police Department. He has taught police strategy at Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and in training settings around the country.
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