Empathy and Resilience to Address Officer Health and 

Performance

Voiceover

00:00

Welcome to The Beat—a podcast series from the COPS Office at the Department of Justice. Featuring 

interviews with experts from a varied field of disciplines, The Beat provides law enforcement with the 

latest developments and trending topics in community policing. 

Jennifer Donelan

00:16

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Beat. I’m your host, Jennifer Donelan. Today, we’re speaking with 

Jared Seide and Rich Goerling from the Center for Council. The Center is an organization that delivers 

programs and trainings that promote communication, enhance well-being, build community, and foster 

compassion. They have developed and administered two programs that are law enforcement–focused 

and help officers better absorb and dissipate the inherent stress related to a career in policing and help 

increase mutual understanding and respect between law enforcement and communities. Jared and Rich, 

welcome to The Beat. 

Jared Seide

00:53

Thanks, Jen. It’s great to be here.

Rich Goerling

00:54

Yeah. Thank you, Jen. Good to be here. 

Donelan 

00:56

I’m really excited to have you and I can’t wait to dig in. So what I want to do first for our listeners is 

introduce both of you and I’m going to have you do that yourselves, if you don’t mind. I’m going to begin 

with Jared. Can you tell people about yourself and the Center for Council?

Seide

01:09

Sure can. So my name is Jared Seide. I’m the Executive Director of Center for Council. This is a non-profit 

that’s based in Los Angeles and has programs throughout California, throughout the country, and 

actually internationally now as well. The programs really do the work that you have described, Jen, I 

appreciate it, in promoting communication and well-being, and building community, et cetera, and 

really focus on how it is we can embody compassion. And I am excited to talk about that because I think 

it’s often misunderstood what compassion really looks like. It’s not about hugging everybody and it’s not 

soft. It’s something that I think is required for living in a complex world. Council is a practice that we 
have built all of our programs around and it is really what animates our work. We’ll talk more about 

what that looks like and how it really is a kind of an expression of mindfulness, of paying attention, of 

coming together, and figuring out the kind of folks we want to be both in terms of being able to 

maintain our own health and wellness, but also the relationships that are important to us in our lives 

and at work, and to contribute to society in a good way to really be out there caring for folks in the work 

we do and resourcing ourselves so that we can sustain ourselves through our week, through our career, 

and through our lives.

Donelan 

02:19

And this is such a timely topic. It’s a hot-button topic. You’ve got a lot of people asking questions: How 

do we improve? How do we change? How do we build? And a lot of what you’re talking about—I didn’t 

miss the fact that you said it’s not soft, I can understand there that you are trying to make sure that your 

folks like don’t tune us out—that this is actual applicable programs and practices that we can apply to 

sort of really directly attack some of which has been brought up, a lot of which has been brought up, as 

points of concern by the community. But it’s not just about community relations. This is about the law 

enforcement officers themselves. So let me now move to Rich Goerling. Rich, tell me about yourself, and

how you’re connected to Jared and the Center for Council.

Goerling

03:01

Thank you, Jen. Yeah, Jared first and foremost is a friend and he’s a collaborative partner. My work is in 

training mindfulness skills to police officers primarily. I also train firefighters and medics and military 

veterans. I’m a retired police Lieutenant. I spent 24 years in civilian law enforcement. I had a parallel 

career in the U.S. Coast Guard and Coast Guard Reserve—27 years there. And I don’t know, about 15 

years ago, I started looking at occupational trauma and its impact on our humanity and human 

performance. And that led me to this thing called mindfulness. And it led me to a lot of science around 

mindfulness and, you know, kind of fast forward to today I’m faculty on two different universities, 

Pacific University here in Oregon at our Mindful Health and Resilience Lab, and Portland State 

University, where we conduct research on mindfulness and policing.

And Jared speaks to this idea that compassion isn’t soft and it really parallels this philosophy that we 

have at the organization I run called Mindful Badge, that compassion is fierce and it’s kind and it holds 

boundaries. And it’s a critical ingredient to not only the health of the police officer, to the humanity of 

the police officer, but to the human performance in the field. And so the one thing that I recognized 

early on in my career was that there’s a need for change in policing in America. And you all can’t see me, 

but I’m a White male and I spent my career in policing, obviously, as a White male. And just recognizing 

how maladapting to occupational trauma erodes skills like compassion—and it is a skill. It’s not a choice, 

nor is it a policy. We really need to learn: How do we train this skill of compassion? And that’s what 

Jared and I are doing together.
Donelan 

04:50

I think compassion, too, it’s one of those things where not only is it not soft, it requires great strength

especially in the face of perhaps others around you who may be pressuring you, or you don’t want to

appear a certain way. And these are, you know, mindfulness, compassion, resilience—these are the buzz 

words. They’re not going away and they’re not buzzwords; they’re practices, and law enforcement 

agencies across the United States are engaging and embracing these as we move forward. So this may 

be a beginning of a conversation, but it’s one that’s not going away so I love that we’re going to be 

talking about this. 

Now, I want to talk about the law enforcement programs that are run by the Council, and I want to talk 

about two in particular. I want to start with POWER and I’ll give a little bit of an overview as I understand 

it. And please, Jared, I’ll move to you and have you sort of flesh this out. The POWER program was 

highlighted at this year’s International Association of Chiefs of Police Officer Wellness Symposium in a 

presentation that was entitled “Mindfulness and Resiliency Meets Community Engagement: Empathy, 

Awareness, and Procedural Justice,” led by both Jared and Rich, our guests.

In 2018, the program was piloted with officers from the Federal Bureau of Prisons followed by several 

cohorts from the Los Angeles Police Department. POWER is now certified by the California Commission 

on Police Officer Standards and Training and provides professional credit to police and correctional 

officers throughout California. Let’s get down to it. Jared, what is POWER? What is the POWER program? 

Seide

06:14

So it’s an acronym that stands for “Peace Officer Wellness, Empathy, and Resilience.” It really is a 

sustainable approach to shifting culture, to creating a culture of wellness for individuals who are 

suffering at really intolerable levels. And Rich can talk a little bit more about what we understand about 

not just occupational stress, but you know, what it is we sign up for when we joined the force, what we 

can expect to find as far as how the job takes its toll on us. POWER presents an awareness of ourselves 

in terms of our body and mind and emotions and relationships. We’ll go into that, hopefully in more 

detail, because I think how we cultivate that self-awareness is real important, but also our capacity to 

regulate our stress and dysregulation and really effective management of our reactivity.

It develops this through a great deal of science-based, evidence-based work that is offered in both sort 

of the pedagogy, but also in very interactive exercises. It’s offered one-on-one and it is sustained 

through the course of six months. So this is a pretty deep dive into bringing this work into the lives of 

the agencies and the individuals, and really leans on this practice of council, which we call huddles 

where folks huddle up with each other without a sort of an expert or an outsider. Unpack some of the 

work that we’re doing over the course of these six months together in small groups over 30, 45 minutes 

together, maybe five or six officers working together.
This kind of peer-to-peer work becomes sort of an undergirding for how we take the things we 

understand better and really implement them in our lives both on and off watch, and understand how 

these are really affecting us on a day-to-day basis in terms of our health and wellness. I think it 

understands that these issues need to be addressed upstream. We can look at issues like excessive use 

of force and officer-involved shootings, and we can hear politicians and lawmakers talking about this, 

but I think that’s a real downstream effect of something that really points to a lack of good training and 

resources upstream, where we train.

And so training folks to have better self-awareness, capacity for self-regulation, and an understanding, 

helps us regulate our nervous system. It helps us develop more wholesome and skillful relationships on 

the job and at home and work that work-life balance and then resources us to meet the community in a 

good way. We can’t be held accountable for being skillful with compassion in the community if we

haven’t figured out how to take care of ourselves and how to really cultivate the relationships we want 

to see in our lives and at home.

So, bottom line: I think that the program improves health and wellness. It provides tools for managing 

stress and dysregulation for mitigating the excessive use of force and our sort of maladaptive 

approaches to ways we handle the stress that arises in critical incidents. And it fosters more positive 

police community relations, which is so critical, but is really something that we can apply once we’ve 

learned these skills and develop these resources.

Donelan 

09:12

Now I may be oversimplifying this, Jared, but it’s basically getting our officers into a better place so they 

can be in a better place in dealing with the community, but really getting down to it, right? This is a 

career which, historically, you don’t talk about your feelings and that was sort of looked down upon and 

you were hesitant to raise your hand and say, “Hey, you know what, I’m stressing out. My family life is 

taking a hit. I’m personally taking a hit, and it’s kind of spilling over into my dealings with residents in the 

streets.” And this is trying to really attack that, and that’s what I’m asking you. Am I gathering that 

correctly?

Seide

09:45

Absolutely. I think you’re right on it, Jen. And I think that the important thing to understand about 

mindfulness and compassion is it’s really about paying attention and then deciding to do something. I 

think it’s all right to sort of take another stab at understanding compassion. Compassion is not 

sympathy. Compassion is not even empathy. Compassion is feeling genuine concern about the suffering 

of others and having a desire to do something about it, attending to the suffering that we see around us 

when folks are in distress. And it also includes an awareness of our own suffering and attention to those 

things that are eating away at us. That’s part of compassion as well.
So it means developing selfcare skills to self-regulate and sustain ourselves throughout our career and 

be healthy so that we can exercise insight and our sort of ethical core and stay balanced. But we need to 

resource ourselves to stay grounded in this and to really be able to listen to what’s around us, what’s 

coming up in the folks we serve, but also in our agencies, and in our own physiology that requires a 

capacity to listen better, listen more deeply. Listening is at the core of everything we do to pay 

attention. And I don’t mean listening like sounds we hear with our ears; I mean paying attention to our 

bodies and our emotions and our minds, our mental state, as well as our relationships.

And I think these really define us and we often neglect to pay enough attention or to attune well to that. 

And these are things that really do require our attention. We have to listen to the conditions of others 

around us in the community. And, frankly, we have to listen to the planet. We have to listen to the 

world we’re living in. We have to develop this capacity to listen deeply in order to embody this 

compassion in the world and also to lead a healthy and a satisfying life and to do our jobs well and to

make the world a better place.

Donelan 

11:28

Absolutely. I love that. Rich, you come from a law enforcement background and for someone who’s at 

home listening to this, who’s maybe got 10 years on... Sounds nice, but really can I really, can we make 

this real-world? You talked about the six months in the groups and so what is the real-world application? 

How is this working? Give us a bird’s-eye view of the program itself.

Goerling

11:53

Well, Jen, if I could maybe step back before we dive into the strategic lens of the program and let’s talk 

about trauma for a moment. What we have failed at as an institution in policing is to really bring the 

contemporary science around trauma and human performance together. And I’ve just created a lot of 

tension out there in the audience, probably, but we failed. We have failed to address occupational 

trauma and the ways we have addressed it are clearly not working well. And so we have an epidemic of 

human suffering behind the badge, and I don’t mean that like, “Oh, we should put on kid gloves and 

change our voice to some sing-song voice and talk softly.” No. I think we need to be gritty and practical 

and tactical around our understanding of trauma. You said earlier that we don’t like to talk about our 

feelings. 

I think that that’s commonly how we think about getting real is: “Oh, we’re going to hold hands and sing 

songs and talk about our feelings.” No. What we are going to do, however, is understand the latest body 

of neuroscience informs us that emotion is a neurophysiological response to the world around us, and it 

is not an optional phenomenon. And so what we want to do is when we use these skills of mindfulness 

to train police officers, to notice emotion, to notice other things that we think are emotion that actually 

are not, to be attuned to the physical body, attuned to the thinking mind, and attuned to the emotional 

climate that we have as a human being, and to regulate it skillfully.
So rather than try to avoid stress and trauma, I want to teach police officers how to get good at it, how 

to step into the middle of human suffering—both their own and others—and perform their tradecraft 

exceptionally and come back from the crisis, and then take informed actions towards the kinds of 

interventions that are necessary to move into healing and recovery and set conditions for posttraumatic growth, which is something we’re not talking about. And shame on us for not talking about 

the possibility of becoming stronger through all of this.

And so our culture is built around a fixed mindset, around occupational stress and trauma injury, and it’s 

not working. And what I tell police officers day one in our training with the POWER program is you will 

be trauma injured over the course of your career. This is what the data tell us. And it’s also what the 

lived experience tell us, right? So we have science and wisdom informing us that, “Oh yeah, this job is a 

trauma profession and I’m going to bear witness to human suffering and bring those skills of 

compassion,” right?

As Jared described that, I see that there’s suffering happening and I have a desire to act. And it requires 

us to cultivate skills to be able to do that, right, to resource ourselves to be able to step into those 

spaces where there is suffering and do the work that we signed up to do. And that means getting real. 

That means recognizing when we’re experiencing stress injury, trauma injury, occupational injury, 

however you want to frame it. I use stress and trauma interchangeably because they’re effectively on 

this range of the same phenomenon. So this is about teaching police officers how to be attuned to 

what’s a normal part of the human experience, and then how to do something about it rather than how 

to move into this experiential avoidance, which is a very common thing so that we want to avoid 

discomfort. We want to move away from it.

So that’s why we see maladaptive behaviors such as alcohol misuse and risky sexual practices and 

violence and other kinds of things that get in our way of being pro-social and create cognitive failures on 

the job as well as in our social lives. So we have a lot of work to do to cultivate these skills. And just 

simply the act of cultivating these skills we are pushing culture a different direction because the current 

culture says, “I don’t want to talk about this. I’m so strong. If I were really a strong warrior, I wouldn’t be 

injured.” No. If you’re really a strong warrior, you’ll be aware that injury is there and you’ll do something 

with it because that’s the real world.

So we’re shifting the relationship of the police officer to trauma. We are creating trauma competency. 

We’re going well beyond knowledge, academic-based trauma informed to a trauma competency. We’re 

getting good at stress and trauma.

Seide

16:10

I just love everything that this insight that Rich has been able to articulate so well into this very specific 

culture. I think there are some things that we fall into in the pursuit of noble causes. We can talk about 

altruism and integrity and empathy and respect and engagement. These are something that this 

wonderful scholar on compassion, Joan Halifax, talks about as Edge States, but there’s such a thing as 
pathological altruism, where we hurt ourselves in the process trying to take care of somebody and 

ultimately that doesn’t help anybody. There’s empathic distress. There’s moral suffering. There’s a lot to 

parse in doing our jobs well, trying to do the right thing.

And we fall into traps when we’re not well-resourced in pursuing those things that seem so clear. There 

is a lot more complexity in there. And I think it’s important to take a moment and just understand 

mindfulness is paying attention. That’s what it is. If you want to go a little bit further, the working 

definition of mindfulness is paying attention on purpose to the present moment without judgment. 

That’s a definition from Jon Kabat-Zinn, molecular biologist and the father of MBSR, Mindfulness-Based 

Stress Reduction. I think another way to think about this is it’s the ability to really listen, to pay attention 

to what’s around us, and to what’s coming up inside us.

And when you think about communication, I think you have to think about how we listen to our bodies, 

to stress and fatigue and the sensations our bodies feel, to sleep we’re getting or not getting, especially 

on shift work that doesn’t allow for proper sleep and navigating circadian rhythms, to nutrition. We 

have a gut biome that feels poisoned when we pour a lot of processed food in there and white sugar. 

And that sends us a stress signal from our guts up. Our mental state is constantly affected by attitudes in 

our inner critic and the bias that we all carry, biases we’ve learned and biases that are hardwired in and 

unchangeable.

And as Rich says, our emotional lives—the anger and joy and care and trauma—drives a lot of our 

behavior. And sometimes we’re not aware of that and it’s important to pay attention. And, finally, I 

think our relationships are critical and we often don’t spend time cultivating really wholesome, positive 

relationships with good communication, both in terms of people we work with on the job and our 

families at home and even the communities. I think it’s really important that we understand as an 

ecosystem, and there’s a lot of awareness to bring to all of these levels.

And this POWER program really gives us the time to talk about the physical and the mental and the 

emotional in what we call the social, you know, the way we show up in the world, because it’s all 

connected. It’s all connected in terms of our capacity to function, but also in terms of what we call 

procedural justice in the world. And those factors that really cultivate positive relationships between 

police and community are really predicated on skillfulness around all of this.

Donelan 

18:51

Thank you, Jared. I’m glad that you explained mindfulness because that was going to be my next 

question, just to sort of like, let’s start with the ground zero definition of mindfulness. Personally, I’ve 

been through a situation, a highly stressful... It ended with me having suffering a cardiac event. And I 

went into counseling and mindfulness is what was immediately presented to me. And there are 

exercises to this day that I still practice when I feel myself getting stressed, or I feel myself recalling that 

traumatic event and getting fearful.
And it’s literally breathing and paying attention to what is around me and paying attention to the sounds 

I hear and paying attention to literally what I feel. And at the time I remember feeling like, “Really? Is 

this what’s going to do it for me?” And here we are 10 years later and I’m still practicing. I still whip 

these tools out when I feel myself becoming overwhelmed or stressed out and they actually work. So 

let’s move into sort of what you’re doing with these officers through the POWER program that are giving 

them these tools to actually practice mindfulness and resiliency and how you actually apply it.

Seide

20:01

I mentioned Joan Halifax. She’s studied this in great depth and she says, “compassion is not teachable, 

but compassion is made up of non-compassionate elements that are trainable.” And that’s why we train 

in attention and self-regulation and listening well, ways to cultivate better communication and 

relationality. These are all things we can train in, and there’s a variety of ways we can approach this that 

are science-based. We know enough about the autonomic nervous system to understand that we have a 

very basic fight-flight freeze, sympathetic overdrive response to stress.

And the stress, as I mentioned, can be, you know, an immediate exigent situation where we’re stressed 

because there’s screaming and yelling and lots of chaos, but it also can be the meal we ate or the lack of 

sleep. There are a lot of ways our body experiences stress and goes into this sympathetic tone that 

creates a reaction in our body that actually is hurting us. It can lead to a catastrophic event and thank 

goodness you were able to get the intervention you needed when that event happened to you.

But there are a lot of folks who aren’t as lucky, but in the course of experiencing inflammation, which is 

the condition that’s so dispositive, excessive amounts of stress, there are all kinds of things we’re doing 

to our bodies when, to use Rich’s expression, we have maladaptive responses to this stress. I think we 

can teach ways to whether it’s a breathing exercise or whether it’s taking a walk, whether it’s better 

nutrition or whether it’s understanding sleep and how to get to sleep. There are ways we can intervene 

and bring on the parasympathetic nervous system that creates a kind of cyclicity in our autonomic 

nervous system that is more healthy. Without that cyclicity, with a constant over-aroused sympathetic 

state, we are killing ourselves.

We are literally killing ourselves and the way in which we are hurting ourselves is evident in catastrophic 

ways, as well as just stress-related illness that is chronic over time and leads to a mortality rate and age

that is just extraordinary as we understand law enforcement is creating folks who are dying 10—by 

some estimates 20—years earlier than average population. There’s some horrible things we’re doing to 

ourselves because we’re not regulating our stress well. And what we’re teaching are ways to intervene, 

to recognize what’s happening and to come up with a plan and come up with practices.

And so the exposure in the training we do is based on science at first, but it really is based on 

experience. And every week officers who participate receive assignments that involve exercises to do, 

activities to be involved with, things to consider and contemplate, and maybe even journal on or write 

about, and then to really kind of get into in a conversation with your peers. So you’ve got every week, 45 

minutes to show up and talk about conversations you had or stress you experienced or ways you, you 
know, kind of thought about the food you’re eating that week, in a very directed way that moves 

through all of these spheres of awareness and relies on the collective wisdom of your peers at work, as 

opposed to an expert or someone from the outside.

And over six months of deep consideration of this, I think we create different kinds of habits that lead us 

to a more healthy way to approach our wellness, to optimize the performance, the way we do our work, 

and also to be ambassadors of this kind of capacity for compassion as we meet the communities, all of 

these things are downstream of doing this work. And I think the curriculum in the presentation of the 

program is something that has a really important and positive impact on a lot of different levels.

Donelan 

23:18

So, real world application: How has this been received? I mentioned earlier that you had the pilot 

program in California. How has this been received? Real world, you know. I can see executive staff, 

command staff, or anyone quite frankly, looking at their schedule and saying, “How am I going to fit this 

in?” But despite the fact that it’s unbelievably important, how’s it been received, and is it doable? And 

those listening say, “You know what, it’s that important. We’ll figure out a way to get this fit in.” 

Seide

23:45

Yeah, I think that’s the case. And I want to sort of defer to Rich in terms of agency culture, but I’ll just 

say that the imperative is there. Here in California, we have legislators that created a grant program that 

enabled us to develop this—not only with Bureau of Prisons, but then with the Los Angeles Police 

Department, which is a pretty sizable agency. I think starting small with cohorts, seeing the impact it has 

on the units that are participating in this program has convinced command staff that this needs to be 

really scaled up.

So within an agency, we take one step at a time as we go through the first six months. We understand 

that there are certainly anecdotal evidence and data points regarding how folks are sleeping better and 

how they’re experiencing their own wellness, but we’re also measuring along validated scales, academic 

scales, pre, mid, and post to really see the changes happening. I think in a lot of the reporting you have 

officers who say, “Well, I don’t know that this is working. I mean, my wife says I’m a nicer person and I 

am sleeping better and my kids want to hang out with me and I’m feeling a lot more energy and I have a 

better attitude, but I’m not sure this is really working.” 

And it’s like, well, okay, so fine. I think we can understand something that’s going on that’s different, 

and that’s what’s important. And I think it’s consistent enough to see the impact, and you’re right. It’s a 

big commitment to talk about, say 25 officers moving through six months of training. But I think when 

you activate folks, when you see the really extraordinary difference in their disposition, when you see 

the lights go on and this awareness increase and their own self-reporting, you begin to realize this is 

invaluable and it is necessary before there’s another reported suicide, before there’s another person 

who’s engaged in a maladaptive behavior that leads to all kinds of repercussions, not only in their 
health, but in their lives. We must be moving in this direction. It is well overdue and it works. So it’s a 

question kind of of economics, but I want to sort of throw to Rich at this point, because I think you have 

a lot more insight and visibility on the direct impact it has on agency culture and individuals.

Goerling

25:38

Yeah. I mean, I can speak to the individual a fair amount because I’ve trained hundreds of first 

responders, hundreds of police officers over the last 10 years in mindfulness skills and they talk to me. 

Not only do they talk to me, but we also have data. So some of that data I’ll just share with you. This is 

from Pacific University here in Oregon. We know that after eight weeks of skill building and mindfulness, 

that we see consistent results like reductions in anger and aggression, improvements in compassion and 

empathy, less alcohol use, less reactivity, less what we call experiential avoidance, which means we’re 

more likely to step into difficult conversations or difficult reflections around self as opposed to moving 

away from those.

And we also see reductions in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that comes from a study 

at University of Wisconsin in Madison. And we’re seeing a greater regulation of the stress 

neurochemical cortisol, and that’s a significant factor in the inflammation of the body, which is probably 

the underlying factor—inflammation—in a lot of diseases that we’re seeing show up in law enforcement 

that are chronic. And John Violanti out of Buffalo, New York has done research on this. His team 

published a study a little over a year ago that looked at duty-related illness deaths from things like 

cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, and it’s an alarming increase over the last 22 years based on his 

team’s research and paying attention to those things is critically important.

So we have sort of the data from research that says this is impactful. I think the qualitative data, the 

anecdotal data from police officers, is that mindfulness skills training when it’s embodied is 

transformational. I mean, I’ve seen it transform relationships with partners, spouses, children, and really 

it resources police officers to show up, to come back to the foundation of that warrior ethos, but it adds 

this humanitarian component to it that is sustainable, and it allows them to show up in their community 

in new ways with all of the skills of their tradecraft. So they’re not giving up anything.

They’re actually getting more skillful with what they have and they’re able to hold humanity, or they’re 

able to bring a deeper embodied level of compassion to the work that they do, even when they might 

have to use force in a situation. And I think that what we’re able to do with mindfulness training—this is 

sort of my hypothesis because we can’t measure this just yet, we’re working on it—but I think we’re 

going to see reductions in the awful but lawful force response that we see really in every agency. Right? 

And again, that’s one of those, you know, you just set on fire statement, but it’s the real world. We need 

to have real conversation about teaching police officers to self-regulate, to regulate the normal human 

phenomenon.

So I believe very strongly that dysregulated anger and dysregulated fear and dysregulated ego are the 

three primary forces that create organizational toxicity and that create cognitive failures in the field 

when it comes to not just force response, but just how we interact with the community members. And 
notice I said dysregulated because anger and fear and ego are critical components of the human 

experience, and we just simply need to regulate them because we need them, but we get reactive. We 

get dysregulated, and that state of dysregulation creates harm. It’s that classic hurt people hurt people. 

We know this intuitively, right?

Anybody knows that. The science is telling us that. And the science is also telling us that skill-building 

and mindfulness, or said differently: Skill-building and attention and compassion is a game changer. It is 

also a disruptor to police culture as we know it today, which means that there’s a bit of a convincing. 

There’s a bit of engagement we have to make with police leaders to convince them that this is the 

direction to go. And it’s much less of a challenge today as it was 10 years ago or even longer when I first 

started those conversations with police leaders, who, frankly, in many cases just summarily dismissed 

me for being somebody who wants to levitate. 

Donelan 

29:56

That’s like kumbaya. Yeah.

Goerling

29:56

You’re right. Now— 

Donelan 

29:56

But I’ll tell you what, you’re absolutely right. We are in such a different place than we once were. I’m 

listening to you and I’m smiling because you’re explaining it so beautifully. And I want to say to 

someone, “Hey, this means check yourself before you wreck yourself. Get it?” Like, that’s basically what 

this is, but it’s doing so... It’s giving people the tools and the permission to do so and it’s making them 

better human beings. It’s making them better police officers. It’s making them better spouses. It’s giving 

them outlets. What is the translation on the streets? You talked about that, but I want to dig a little 

more into that because of community-police relations and investment like this both time and perhaps 

financial, the commitment of it, spells what in the end for the community, in terms of those officers that 

will be out there answering those calls for service? 

Someone who’s gone through a program like this, someone who is being mindful, someone who is 

compassionate has been taught and given a permission to be compassionate, who’s got less cortisol, 

less of that inflammatory situation both mentally and physically, you know—what does that spell for the 

community?
Seide

31:02

I’m really glad you asked that question. This is not a police problem. This is not an activist problem. This 

is a human problem, and it’s something we all have to get on the same page with on some level. And I’m 

going to further set fire to this podcast, perhaps, by talking about this, but I think it’s important to. The 

work that we did really began with an understanding of the need for social and emotional learning skills 

in schools.

We started this in education a couple of decades ago, and it migrated over to work with incarcerated 

populations. We were working in prisons a great deal, understanding that criminogenic factors that we 

understand to lead the criminal behavior—lack of empathy, lack of impulse control, antisocial attitudes, 

antisocial friends, and behavior—really are affected by bringing online these skills and resources and 

putting people in these Council huddles, where they can recognize their shared humanity.

What we saw happen on prison yards—and we’re in 27 different prisons now in California—as a result 

of the extraordinary impact it’s had on culture, on the yard, not only in terms of violence and infractions 

on these prison yards, but in terms of grants of parole. And folks who are incarcerated, who go through 

a very similar program and wind up kind of entering the next chapter of their lives in community in a 

very different place. You know, that really was where this POWER program was born, frankly.

Donelan 

32:16

Is that the Circle Up program? Is that the one I mentioned at the beginning through the Cops and 

Communities?

Seide

32:21

So the program is called the Prison Council Initiative, and what it does is it brings a very similar kind of 

methodology to groups of inmates, cohorts of 25, who go through six months in the same kind of way. 

And in this case, they’re often coming at this program from a lot of different places, different ethnicities 

and gang affiliations and such, and they learn this work together and they come out of it affecting the 

culture of the prison and actually entering into society. Virtually everybody that we’ve worked with in 

the initial cohorts that have gone to their parole board have gotten grants. And it’s really an amazing 

thing to see them come out into the community.

We, as an organization, we train folks not just in prisons and in schools, but healthcare professionals, 

first responders, folks in business. In every instance, the situation is different. The culture is different. 

We talk about different things, but the skillsets are the same. And I think there is a point where we have 

to understand that it’s a lot easier to work with folks with whom we are familiar. We’ve built some 

comfort. We understand like-minded, like-hearted groups kind of like they say “lowering the affective 

filter” when they teach ESL. We have to get comfortable.
You can’t have LAPD and Black Lives Matter all enter a room with placards and screaming and yelling 

and expect you’re going to have a productive day. We need to really build these skills separately. But 

soon enough, we begin to recognize who is not in the circle, who we don’t even want to be in the circle 

with us, who we’re not ready to sit with, some understanding of the other. We actually set a chair for 

those folks. And for one reason or another, they’re not here with us, but we realized that we may have 

something to say to them, whether it’s the community or officers or incarcerated folks, we may have 

something to say to them. And they may have something to say to us, we’re not ready to sit with them, 

but we’re ready to start thinking about it. And after a minute, we have an interest in calling them in. And 

I think that’s the point at which we realize we are resourced enough and skillful enough to go beyond 

our like groups and start to merge and blend. We’ve had a sort of parallel play environment where folks 

are learning these skills separately, but when we merged them, some extraordinary things happen.

And I think when we look at a concept like procedural justice, going by the DOJ definition, that it’s about 

fairness and transparency and community voices being heard and impartiality. We understand that 

these are skills we are training in, essentially, how to give folks the feeling they are being listened to and 

that somebody cares. We all need that. And there is a skillfulness around this that enables us to meet 

each other in a way that feels productive. We don’t have to hang out. We don’t have to have the same 

hobbies or vote for the same politicians— 

Donelan 

32:21

Right.

Seide

34:49

But we have to get along. We have to recognize that we all need to live in a fair and just world and we 

all need resources. And if that doesn’t happen, there’s going to be conflict. And I think that’s kind of at 

the root of this very lofty concept of beloved community. We don’t have to agree all the time, but we 

have to get along on some level and have the big picture of the whole human family and our kids, 

frankly. Our grandkids will be growing up in a world in which they’re going to be connected to the kids 

and the grandkids of those we think to be our adversaries, as well as our friends.

We owe it to them to figure out a way to get along and to cultivate positive relationships. I think it has 

an enormous impact. I think it begins with learning the skills to take care of ourselves, to sustain our 

health and to do well at our jobs. But we understand we can use those in creating a better world.

Donelan 

35:32

And you’re right. It can’t be pie in the sky.

Seide

35:35

Right.
Donelan 

35:35

This is real.

Seide

35:35

Mm-hmm. [affirmative] 

Donelan 

35:35

This is our world. This is our lives. It’s going to be something that happens for us, but we have the future. 

Our children have to grow up in this world. And if we’re not talking to one another, and if we’re not 

listening to one another, we’re not going to get anywhere. So I love that. It creates those safe spaces for 

you to build these skills in order to create those atmospheres and environments where these 

discussions can take place. And that we actually hear one another so that we can proceed forward 

together. Because I can tell you this: You’re right, the state of affairs as it stands now, we can’t have 

police officers dying as young as they are from the stress in their lives.

Obviously the status quo is on the table at this point in terms of how we behave with one another as a 

society. And something’s got to give, right? And this surely seems like a path forward to that. I want to

make sure that I don’t leave you two hanging on anything that you might want to talk about that I 

haven’t touched on. Rich? 

Goerling

36:32

Yeah, Jen. I would want to say too, you asked how does this translate to the streets and the community? 

Let me frame it this way: So as a police officer with mindfulness skills training that I’ve embodied, I’m 

more compassionate. I am more regulated and I’m more open to possibilities. So that means that 

embodied in my cognitive paradigm, there is a curiosity that asks what else could be true. And there’s an 

awareness of my emerging judgments and bias, and I’m more skillfully equipped to work with those 

things. And this all enhances my ability to take in information.

It enhances my ability to make sense of that information and my ability to make decisions in that 

moment. And this is the outcome of a lot of hard work. And the thing that’s different about this training 

and other mindfulness training models is that this really is hard work. This is bad-ass warrior skills 

training, unlike anything that we’ve introduced in policing probably in the last three decades, maybe 

longer, because it requires us to confront ourself. And that is a very difficult confrontation to make. And 

so we facilitate that and there’s also other interventions that can facilitate that with integrated medical 

care and the psychotherapy and social connection and other things.

We talk about those things as well, but this is hard skills training and it’s not a check-the-box kind of 

training like so many other trainings are. And the other thing I would say is that this is where we began. 

Mindfulness, Council, is where we began to really actually embed other principles of social justice within 
policing that we’ve tried to do for a number of decades like restorative justice, like procedural justice. 

And now, you know, ideally like anti-racism, right, and other things that are noble good efforts to 

improve policing in America and connect police with their community instead of create greater barriers 

between the two.

And it really begins with this organic technology of self and that’s where mindfulness brings us. It brings 

us to this capacity to be attuned to oneself and therefore be more equipped to make informed decisions 

about how to regulate, how to seek external interventions. Again, back to psychotherapy, back to social 

connection, back to pursuit of spirit, awe, adventure and joy, right? All of these things that are critically 

important that are adaptive ways of working with this profession of suffering that brings us front and

center with trauma and crisis.

Donelan 

39:08

What I find so exciting about it is that it doesn’t seem like this completely out of the world notion. I 

often say, “The only person I can control is me,” and you’re beginning with the person

Goerling

39:19

Mm-hmm. [affirmative] 

Donelan 

39:20

And you’re right. This isn’t something that anyone has really attempted to do in policing in 30 years so

it’s refreshing. It is absolutely refreshing. Jared, do you have anything you’d like to talk about?

Seide

39:32

Thanks, Jen. I think, yes. This is about health and wellbeing. Yes. There is a critical urgency around this. 

There is a crisis and we need to do something about it. There is science and there are ways we can 

intervene to keep folks who put on the badge healthy and to protect them. There are ways we can do 

that. And I think it goes beyond that as well. So what we’re talking about here is not only health and 

well-being, we’re talking about how to be a more compassionate, ethical, happy, and healthy person, 

individually, in relationships, and in community.

And I think it’s cultivating a literacy, a vocabulary for talking about these things so that we can take care 

of ourselves and we can be allies. I think this notion of sort of the other is out there and something that 

this work enables us to do is to actually enjoy, or maybe even thrive in that ecosystem. To go beyond 

this idea of us and them, and really work towards creating the world that we’re able to create for 

ourselves and our children and the next generation.
There are ways we can become more resourced to be the people that we want to be and to create the 

world we want to create and also to protect our health and well-being. And I think it’s about time we 

prioritize this and we begin to explore ways that work and evidence that shows us that we can really 

make a difference.

Donelan 

40:46

Absolutely. Well said. Thank you. Gentlemen, how can our listeners get in touch with you to learn more 

about the POWER program and the other programs that are offered by the Center for Council?

Seide

40:57

Thanks, Jen. The best way to do that is through the website. And that is www.centerforcouncil.org/le for 

law enforcement. So it’s Center for Council, C-E-N-T-E-R-F-O-R C-O-U-N-C-I-L-dot-org-O-R-G-slash-L-E for 

law enforcement. There’s a lot of information there and the ways to contact us and our team. We have 

the capacity to really get into some good conversations with folks all over the country and beyond. And 

we’re really excited that there’s a core rising of interest in this. We really want to be part of the 

conversation and look forward to folks reaching out and exploring what we can do better.

Donelan 

41:35

Absolutely. That is just beautiful and I’m really excited. I was honored to have you both on the show. 

Rich Goerling, how would our listeners get in touch with you specifically?

Goerling

41:43

Yes. So for me, the best way to connect with me is probably through my website. It’s mindfulbadge.com. 

That’s M-I-N-D-F-U-L-B-A-D-G-E-dot-C-O-M. 

Donelan 

41:55

All right, perfect. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Jared. We’re going to be watching. I’m really excited about 

having you on the show and I’m excited that we’re going to be able to connect our listeners to you as we 

all work towards improving and making the world a better place to be at the end of the day. Everybody, 

we want to thank you for listening to this edition of The Beat. 
Voiceover: The Beat Exit

42:14

The Beat is brought to you by the United States Department of Justice’s COPS Office. The COPS Office 

helps to keep our nation’s community safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing 

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Voiceover: Disclaimer

43:11

The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official 

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, 

products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department

of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.