Chaplains also help officers in other ways such as assisting with transportation of a person who has been picked up for an offense and needs a way to get home or, on the other hand, delivering the heartbreaking news that a family member has been killed or severely injured in an accident. If there s a death and the officers have to deliver that news, they often will ask the chaplains to go along to help the people get through the immediate impact of that tragedy on the family. It boils down to being a good listener. I m there to listen. They need someone they can talk to who is not a member of their chain of command, not someone who is there to critique their performance, not someone who has any other interest except listening to them, understanding the job they do and valuing them both as individuals and as police officers.
Police officers are a close knit group of people.
They seldom talk about their jobs with people outside that circle, Smith said. As part of the police chaplains work, Smith recently completed a three-day training session by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. The intent of the class is to teach the volunteer chaplains and police officers to deal with the aftermath of a violent confrontation or other incidents in which lives are lost, especially where officers have been involved in the fatal shooting of suspects or where fellow officers have been killed in the line of duty. Psychologists have found that if the officers do not deal with the psychological trauma and stress of critical incidents within 72 hours of the event, the effects can be profound, sometimes even ending their careers as police officers, Smith said. This training teaches us to ask them to describe what happened, to describe what they were thinking about, what happened to them in their mind and how they are feeling now.