The Policing Mind - Developing Trauma Resilience for a New Era

 

How does it feel to be a police officer in the UK? What happens in the brains of officers, particularly in high-risk roles such as counter-terrorism and child sexual exploitation?

Jessica Miller uses the most recent neuroscience and real-life examples to explore risks to individual resilience, be it trauma exposure, burnout or simply the daily pressure of adapting to life on the front line.

Dr Jess Miller is Principal Investigator of the award-winning Trauma Resilience in UK Policing project, bringing 20 years of research experience, including work in critical incident support and preventing violent extremism. Jess now translates the latest neuropsychology into the reality of operational police trauma resilience training and surveys police wellbeing across the UK.

After a gentle introduction to criminology as an undergraduate, Jess went on to become Director of Studies at the University of Cambridge for the Faculty of Social and Political Science at Lucy Cavendish College in 2003 and tutored undergraduate psychology for a further 3 years. In 2004, she left academia for more ‘hands-on’ work in civil protection, during which time Jess joined the management team of Cambridgeshire Police’s Critical Incident Personal Support Team, training volunteers to support victims and their families through mass and critical incidents.

After a stint working in Preventing Violent Extremism in 2008, Jess relocated her research South and designed a 150-participant strong neuropsychological study to investigate the role of DNA in trauma processing. The research has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014, Police Professional November 2016, the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and the Journal of Clinical Medicine in 2017.

Jess is now a Research Associate and Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge.

In 2021, Jess joined The Royal Foundation to work on developing new trauma support for Emergency Responders across the UK. Her first book, The Policing Mind: Trauma Resilience for a New Era was published by Bristol University Policy Press in March 2022.

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