Professor Madalyn K. Wasilczuk happens to agree with me about police officers and their emotional development requirements:
Scientists agree that people between ages 18 and 25—sometimes called “emerging adults”—continue to undergo biological and psychological changes that influence the way they behave. Put more simply, they have not fully matured. This lack of maturity manifests in incapacities that make emerging adult officers ill-suited to the job of policing. What’s more, the way policing affects emerging adults may mean that joining the force during this period of their lives will change the way those officers police throughout their careers.
Though police spend a minority of their time dealing with crime, their jobs require a great deal of personal interaction, sometimes in tense situations. These conditions require police to be calm, think on their feet, and have strong emotional self-regulation skills. In emergency situations, where, as the Supreme Court has said, “[p]olice officers are often forced to make split-second judgments,” those judgments should be as well-considered and reasonable as possible. Unfortunately, emerging adults’ developmental capacities make this unlikely. [Lawfare]
Good not to be a lonely voice in the night.
