Customer Reviews

Death Work: Police, Trauma, and the Psychology of Survival

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Vincent Henry is a retired NYPD officer with over 20 years experience. His book - Death Work - is an analysis of the death experience and how it affects law enforcement personnel, specifically members of the NYPD. He takes a look at 5 categories of officers:

- rookies

- sargeants

- homicide detectives

- crime scene technicians

- police survivors (officers who killed suspects, were almost killed by suspects, or who witnessed the death of another officer)

and analyzes how the death experience impacts them psychologically, and how it affects their performance/perception as police officers. All in all, it's insightful and quite thorough. The majority of the book appears to have been written prior to 9/11, but there is a 30 page epilogue where he discusses what he did that day, and how that event impacted the NYPD as a whole. Clearly, police officers in an urban setting become familiar with death fairly quickly.

As a policeman and son of a policeman, Henry is able to give the reader an insider's view of the culture within the NYPD. Additionally, he makes it clear his research was done with the blessing of the NYPD's command hierarchy, and he was given wide latitude to interview and join other officers during the course of their specific duties. One thing I found interesting - Henry makes it clear his objectivity is less than it could be. He obviously cares a great deal about his topic, and an underlying theme throughout the book is his desire to pass this knowledge on to future policemen so they can become better cops. The many people he interviewed are not referred to as subjects, he calls them "collaborators", and his interviews took place not in an office at a college somewhere, but on the streets while these people were on duty.

This is definitely an interesting book. Henry's familiarity with both psychology and law enforcement give his conclusions extra weight they might lack coming from a purely academic researcher. If there are flaws in the book, they're in the length and the style. At over 400 pages, it's a serious read on a serious subject. As to style, the writing is a bit unwieldy. This book wasn't intended for the layman; Henry is a scholar writing for a more academic audience. That doesn't make this a bad book at all - if you work in a first response profession (police/fire/EMS) you'll be able to relate to the psychological responses he describes. But if you're expecting something catchy and breezy like Joseph Wambaugh, this ain't it. I'm just sayin'.