Policing is morally and emotionally unsustainable. To break the cycle of harm we must begin with care for officers and communities traumatized by police violence.
By George Payne
What if justice begins not with punishment, but with care?
What if our failure to care for the communities harmed by police — and for the officers themselves — is the quiet crisis sustaining a system that brutalizes everyone it touches?
We need to talk about the emotional cost of policing. But not in isolation.
We need to talk about George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Tyre Nichols. We need to talk about the rage that floods the streets when a routine stop turns deadly, when a mental health crisis becomes a fatal encounter. These are not isolated incidents, they are systemic patterns. And yet, they are also deeply personal, carried out by individuals who are sometimes breaking under the weight of the very system they represent.
This is not an apology for brutality. It is a reckoning with the deeper truth: Policing in America causes widespread and intimate harm to the policed and to the police themselves.
It harms communities who live under constant surveillance, suspicion and grief. It harms people in moments of crisis — those facing poverty, addiction and mental illness — who are met with force instead of compassion. And it harms officers who, in absorbing the contradictions of their role, often lose touch with their own humanity.
We can’t address police violence without addressing the system that produces it. And we can’t transform that system without confronting the emotional and psychological toll it inflicts on everyone.
When politics becomes a weapon
Captain Frank Umbrino of the Rochester Police Department has been on the job for over 30 years. But what wears him down today isn’t the danger, it’s the fear of being turned into a headline.
“The emotional strain comes from knowing that any call can make you the next headline,” Umbrino said. “Even when you do your job right, there’s someone waiting to exploit it.”
He supports holding bad officers accountable. But he draws a distinction between legitimate oversight and what he calls “weaponized criticism,” a kind of public theater that, in his view, corrodes morale and deepens alienation.
“Bad cops must be dealt with,” he said. “But officers also need protection. That’s what eats away at morale.”
Whether one agrees with him or not, his view exposes a challenge reformers must confront: Secondary trauma doesn’t only affect victims of police violence. It affects officers, too, especially in a climate where public outrage often overshadows systemic solutions.
The system is the symptom
Brian Lovins, founder of Justice System Partners, offers a deeper diagnosis. The problem isn’t that the system is broken, it’s that it works exactly as it was designed to work.
“The system is working exactly as it was built to work,” Lovins explained. “To reproduce itself, not to transform.”
That design wears down even idealistic officers. It discourages vulnerability. It makes empathy risky. It turns compassion into liability.
“We can’t expect traumatized officers to respond humanely to traumatized communities,” Lovins said. “We have to rebuild the entire architecture around the job.”
Real reform, in other words, means more than new training or oversight. It means dismantling the psychic scaffolding of policing itself.
Who heals the healers of harm?
As a former domestic violence counselor in Rochester, New York, I’ve worked alongside law enforcement, sometimes in partnership, sometimes in conflict. I’ve seen the high cost of emotional burnout: rushed decisions, misread trauma cues, closed-off responses not from cruelty but exhaustion.
I’ve also seen officers go above and beyond, protecting survivors, confronting racism within their ranks and standing up for justice. But that courage is rarely sustained without support.
When I first shared this piece with a police sergeant in Washington State, his response was blunt: “You’re making the case for wellness to improve our performance — but not to preserve our humanity.”
He was right. Too often, officer wellness is framed as a tool to reduce liability. But that misses the point. Officers are not machines needing a tune-up. They are people. And like all people, they suffer when the systems they’re in are built on control, fear and emotional suppression.
But this must not become a one-sided portrait.
Because it’s not only police who carry trauma. It’s the families of the incarcerated. It’s the bystanders haunted by violent arrests. It’s the children who grow up afraid of those meant to protect them. It’s entire neighborhoods made brittle by over policing and underinvestment.
We must talk about wellness not just for the police, but for the policed.
When the badge becomes a burden
The statistics are staggering: Police officers are 54 percent more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and twice as likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty.
The sergeant I mentioned earlier is a suicide survivor. He now mentors fellow officers through their darkest hours: “It’s lying awake knowing I got lucky that one call,” he said, describing the kinds of thoughts and experiences officers have. “It’s lifting a dead infant out of a septic tank or going to the same suicidal subject until they’re actually dead — all while shouldering the misconduct of every cop, everywhere.”
This is the emotional fallout of a job that offers no room for grief, and no room to fail.
And while officers need trauma support, so do the people on the other end of those calls. Where are the embedded crisis counselors for survivors of police violence? The therapy vouchers for people wrongly detained or beaten? The family therapy for children who witness raids?
Too often, these supports don’t exist. Everyone is bleeding, but only some get bandages.
What healing can look like
Deputy Chaunte Ford, a veteran officer in Minneapolis, believes healing must be part of the job. She advocates for therapy, breathing techniques, time off and regular emotional check-ins.
“We’re called to run into danger,” she said. “To do that, we must be healthy and supported.”
That support should not be optional. It should be baked into the system.
Survivor advocate Danielle Churly agrees. In Greater Toronto, she worked with officers who followed through on cases, showed up with empathy and treated her with dignity.
“That tells me they’re doing the work,” she said. But she’s quick to name her privilege. “As a white woman, I was seen and heard. That’s not always true for Indigenous women, Two-Spirit people, and others who are systematically ignored.”
The epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the United States makes her point painfully clear: Wellness programs mean nothing if they do not lead to justice for the most harmed.
Breaking the culture of suppression
Ted Forsyth, a community organizer and PhD Sociology candidate at Syracuse University, believes officer wellness will always fail unless the culture of policing itself is dismantled.
“The culture of policing won’t allow this,” he said. “It was built to control, not to care.”
In “Policing Empires,” Julian Go traces how modern policing grew out of imperial power structures, arguing that systems of control and racialized violence were baked into the institution from the start. Forsyth echoes this analysis, insisting that reform must reckon with these colonial roots to build truly just and restorative alternatives.
Craig Waleed, who survived incarceration and now works in restorative justice, echoes that call: “Unhealed people in positions of power are dangerous.”
He argues for embedded wellness programs, ones that include space for grief, racial trauma reflection and moral injury repair.
Corrections consultant Scott Frakes brings that vision into physical space: calming colors, natural light, rooms to decompress. It may sound small. It’s not. It saves lives.
As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.”
What real wellness looks like
A justice system rooted in care — not control — requires:
- Embedded, trauma-informed wellness teams in every department and neighborhood
- Mental health screenings and ongoing care for officers and impacted civilians
- Confidential therapy and peer support, without career retaliation or stigma
- Paid mental health leave and sabbaticals
- Training in emotional intelligence, trauma stewardship and moral injury
- Family-centered supports for those harmed by police violence
- Independent oversight to ensure these programs are real — not performative
- Public investment in non-police crisis responders and community healing hubs
Why this matters
I understand the calls to abolish the police. I’m not there. But I understand the grief and fatigue behind those calls. The sense that reform is always too little, too late.
Still, I hold on to James Baldwin’s warning: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
And this is what we must face: Policing, as it stands, is morally and emotionally unsustainable.
If we want to break the cycle of harm, we must begin where systems rarely do: with care. For officers. For survivors. For families. For entire communities left behind by slogans and statistics.
Care is not indulgent. It is radical.
It is not weakness. It is protection.
It is not optional. It is the ground of any future worth building.
Healing is resistance.
Healing is justice.
Healing is how we survive.
This story was produced by Campaign Nonviolence
George Payne is a domestic violence residential family counselor. He also serves as an adjunct professor of philosophy at Finger Lakes Community College and freelances for a variety of newspapers and online journals.
This article was published on July 8, 2025 at wagingnonviolence.