Police wellness

BACKGROUND: Police work, known for its high stress, exhibits elevated depression rates. OBJECTIVE: This study explores stress and depression in male officers, examining personality traits, coping strategies, family, and social support. Aligned with the diathesis-stress hypothesis and job demands-resources model, it aims to illuminate these factors in policing. METHODS: Two hundred and sixty-four male police officers from Yunlin, Taiwan were enrolled in this study...

Police officers often face emotionally challenging interpersonal situations and numerous studies have demonstrated that policing is a stressful occupation. A study revealed a significant positive correlation between emotional demands among police officers and emotional dissonance, as well as burnout. Health-promoting behaviors can contribute to better overall health outcomes and reduce the risk of developing health problems, but there is limited research evaluating the association of job strain and health behaviors with mental health outcomes in police officers...

BACKGROUND: A key aspect of Australia's response to the COVID-19 pandemic was to control transmission through legislated quarantine and isolation of overseas returning travellers and potentially infectious community members. In New South Wales, Special Health Accommodation (SHA) was rapidly established as a comprehensive health service for individuals that were at risk of having COVID-19, were confirmed to have COVID-19 or for those with complex health needs that were deemed inappropriate for management in Police managed Quarantine Hotels...

The illegal drug market is constantly evolving, with new drugs being created and existing ones being modified. Adulterants are often added to the mix, and the primary substance may be secretly replaced by a new one. Once-known tablets can now be vastly different from what they are sold as, all due to the pursuit of profit and evasion of current drug regulations. These alterations in drug composition pose a threat to society, as their effects are still not well understood. Therefore, it is crucial for police intelligence and public health development to obtain the chemical profiles of illicit drugs...

Despite significant success, targeted therapeutics such as kinase inhibitors (KIs) still pose adverse events such as the cardiotoxicity. There is a lot of variation in the type and intensity of cardiotoxicity caused by different KIs and current pre-clinical models are inadequate to predict it. Thus, there is a need to develop more simple and rapid models for screening of novel KIs at the pre-clinical step itself. We thus aimed to establish a rapid and robust pre-clinical animal model for predicting cardiotoxicity of KIs and identify comparative cardiotoxicity profiles of a panel of FDA-approved KIs...

BACKGROUND: By 2025, road traffic injuries are projected to rank third in the global burden of disease, posing a significant challenge that affects health, social well-being, and economic aspects. According to data from the Romanian Police National Statistics Center, there have been an average of 342 traffic accidents per year involving pediatric patients over the past 10 years. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A retrospective research study was conducted, encompassing 358 cases of road traffic accidents identified for the study, with data collected over a span of eight years, and with the aim of analyzing the types of injury and treatment methods in relation to age and sex, while also focusing on the duration of hospitalization and the occurrence of complications...

BACKGROUND: Public transportation use is influenced by perceptions of safety. Concerns related to crime on New York City (NYC) transit have risen following NYC's COVID-19 pandemic state of emergency declaration in 2020, leading to declines in subway ridership. In response, the most recent mayoral administration implemented a Subway Safety Plan in 2022. This study aimed to quantify the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Subway Safety Plan on rates of complaints to and arrests by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) Transit Bureau...

BACKGROUND: Young adults who commit low-level offences commonly have a range of health and social needs and are significantly over-represented in the criminal justice system. These young adults may need to attend court and potentially receive penalties including imprisonment. Alternative routes exist, which can help address the underlying causes of offending. Some feel more should be done to help young adults entering the criminal justice system. The Gateway programme was a type of out-of-court disposal developed by Hampshire Constabulary, which aimed to address the complex needs of young adults who commit low-level crimes...

First responders require physical fitness to perform dangerous tasks in unpredictable environments. To promote physical fitness among first responders, many agencies use a peer fitness leader (PFL) approach; however, resources for the fitness, wellness, and health of PFLs are often minimal. This study's purpose was to investigate the effectiveness of a training workshop to increase PFL's training knowledge and coaching comfort (CC). Thirty-six PFLs (Experience: 14.6 ± 9.1 yrs; Age: 41.0 ± 9.8 yrs; BMI: 28...

BACKGROUND: Increasing mountain activity and decreasing participant preparedness, as well as climate change, suggest needs to tailor mountain rescue. In Sweden, previous medical research of these services are lacking. The aim of the study is to describe Swedish mountain rescue missions as a basis for future studies, public education, resource allocation, and rescuer training. METHODS: Retrospective analysis of all mission reports in the national Swedish Police Registry on Mountain Rescue 2018-2022 (n = 1543)...

Among people living with HIV (PLWH), heavy alcohol use is associated with many negative health consequences. However, the impacts of heavy alcohol use are not well described for PLWH who use drugs. Thus, we investigated the prevalence and correlates of heavy alcohol use among a cohort of people who use drugs (PWUD) living with HIV in Vancouver, Canada. We accessed data from an ongoing community-recruited prospective cohort of PLWH who use drugs with linked comprehensive HIV clinical monitoring data. We used generalized linear mixed-effects modeling to identify factors longitudinally associated with periods of heavy alcohol use between December 2005 and December 2019...

BACKGROUND: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines legal intervention injuries as injuries caused by law enforcement agents in the course of official duties. Public health databases utilize International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10), coding to collect these data through the "Y35" family ICD-10 code. Prior studies report deficiencies in public health recording of fatal legal intervention injuries. Few studies have characterized nonfatal injuries...

One Stop Crisis Center (OSCC) is a multi-sectorial center aimed to provide medical, social, legal, police and shelter services to survivors of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, sodomy and child abuse. Although OSCCs have been established for almost three decades in different parts of the world including in Malaysia, there is a lack of a validated instrument to measure the service quality rendered in OSCCs. A validated instrument known as OSCC-Qual was developed using a 5-stage approach where (1) in stage 1, group discussions were conducted among all authors to identify potential items for the instrument; (2) in stage 2, content validation was performed by 13 experts using content validity index and modified kappa; (3) in stage 3, exploratory factor analysis was performed by 141 healthcare staff with experience in managing OSCC cases to validate the items as well as to identify the number of factors in the instrument; (4) in stage 4, confirmatory factor analysis was performed by 110 domestic violence survivors to ascertain the validity of the factors and items retained in stage 3 and (5) in stage 5, forward and backward translation into local Malay and Chinese languages was performed...

Every year, hundreds of thousands of youth across the country enter the juvenile legal system. A significantly disproportionate number of them are youth of color. While youth arrests have declined over the past several decades, racial disparities have increased and persist at every stage of the system. Many youth of color enter the juvenile legal system with a history of trauma and stress that compromises their health and well-being. Arrest, prosecution, and incarceration exacerbate these poor health outcomes...

The WHO African Region had 81 million people with chronic hepatitis B in 2019, which remains a silent killer. Hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis delta virus (HDV), and HIV can be transmitted from the mother to child. If the HBV infection is acquired at infancy, it may lead to chronic hepatitis B in 90% of the cases. WHO reports that 6.4 million children under 5 years live with chronic hepatitis B infection worldwide. The prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HBV is therefore critical in the global elimination strategy of viral hepatitis as we take lessons from PMTCT of HIV programs in Africa...

Pregnancy is a period which is especially sensitive to physical violence and its aftermath. Subjecting a pregnant woman to violence can have negative effects on both the mother as well as the child. In Poland, there are programs, such as the Blue Card, aimed at protection against violence, however the phenomenon is underestimated. Documentation covering forensic examinations carried out at the request of the police or privately at the Department of Forensic Medicine in Poznan in the years 2015-2020 was analyzed...

The current article provides a contemporary review of the best practices for interviewing older adults about crimes they witnessed or experienced. Specifically, we provide a detailed overview of how investigators can use a range of interviewing adaptations and procedures to acquire detailed and accurate maltreatment disclosures from older adults. In addition to discussing well-established investigative interviewing practices (e.g. rapport building, free-recall, cognitive instructions and prompts), this article also summarizes more recent literature on the benefits of multidisciplinary investigations, use of assistive technology and interview accommodations, along with effective practices for working with minority and marginalized older adults...

The interviewing of victims, witnesses and suspects is important in helping resolve criminal investigations. In Japan, developments have recently occurred in the training of the police and their public prosecutors in these key tasks. Whilst literature exists on autism in Japan, studies examining police/public prosecutor interviews with autistic adults conducted in that country (and indeed, any other) remain scant. As elsewhere in the world, identification of those who manifest characteristics prevalent on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) scale, has been found to be problematical to criminal justice professionals...

The study of firearm violence in Mexico has primarily focused on homicides and trafficking. Less attention has been given to understanding how firearms affect other crimes and facilitate criminal activity beyond drug markets. By analyzing two questions, this study explores the role of firearms in extortions perpetrated in Mexico from 2012 to 2021. Questions are: What is the likelihood of reporting extortions to the police if offenders exhibited firearms? What is the likelihood of compliance with demands when offenders are armed with firearms? We obtained data from Mexico's National Crime Victimization Surveys and analyzed 2,619 extortions reported from 2012 to 2021...

Physical fitness is mandatory for public safety officers. Police officers experience elevated levels of cardiovascular disease and associated risks making fitness a peak concern. Officers often have more marked fitness level decreases with aging compared to the general population. This cross-sectional study investigated the cardiovascular health, muscular strength/endurance, and mobility of officers in a medium-sized police department (N = 83); (4 females, 79 males), age (36.82 ± 10 years), height (179...