Death Work: Police, Trauma, and the Psychology of Survival (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Robert Jay Lifton (Foreword) "The central premise of this book is that unique psychological and social transformations results from the police officer's encounters with death, and that the extent..." (more)
Key Phrases: death work occupations, tenured cops, crime scene unit technicians, New York City, The General Context, Crime Scene Detectives (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Vincent Henry introduces a new and important line of inquiry into the emotionally dangerous labor of American police officers by offering up a considered appraisal of how NYPD cops approach, cope with, and more or less survive their recurrent and seemingly relentless occupational encounters with death. Scholarly, literate, tightly focused but broadly framed, Death Work is a must read for those who seek to understand both the psychological demands and cultural context of urban policing. By taking readers into the often helpful, if numbing, routines worked out on the ground for the grim yet necessary business of attending to the dead, Henry casts unusual light on matters surprisingly ignored in studies of the police work. This is a read that sticks with one long after putting it down. And properly so."--John Van Maanen, Ph.D., Erwin Schell Professor of Organization Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Product Description

In this fascinating new book, Vincent Henry (a 21-year veteran of the NYPD who recently retired to become a university professor) explores the psychological transformations and adaptations that result from police officers' encounters with death. Police can encounter death frequently in the course of their duties, and these encounters may range from casual contacts with the deaths of others to the most profound and personally consequential confrontations with their own mortality. Using the 'survivor psychology' model as its theoretical base, this insightful and provocative research ventures into a previously unexplored area of police psychology to illuminate and explore the new modes of adaptation, thought, and feeling that result from various types of death encounters in police work.
The psychology of survival asserts that the psychological world of the survivor--one who has come in close physical or psychic contact with death but nevertheless managed to live--is characterized by five themes: psychic numbing, death guilt, the death imprint, suspicion of counterfeit nurturance, and the struggle to make meaning. These themes become manifest in the survivor's behavior, permeating his or her lifestyle and worldview.
Drawing on extensive interviews with police officers in five nominal categories--rookie officers, patrol sergeants, crime scene technicians, homicide detectives, and officers who survived a mortal combat situation in which an assailant or another officer died--Henry identifies the impact such death encounters have upon the individual, the police organization, and the occupational culture of policing. He has produced a comprehensive and highly textured interpretation of police psychology and police behavior, bolstered by the unique insights that come from his personal experience as an officer, his intimate familiarity with the subtleties and nuances of the police culture's value and belief systems, and his meticulous research and rigorous method. Death Work provides a unique prism through which to view the individual, organizational, and social dynamics of contemporary urban policing. With a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton and a chapter devoted to the local police response to the World Trade Center attacks, Death Work will be of interest to psychologists and criminal justice experts, as well as police officers eager to gain insight into their unique relationship to death.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (April 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195157656
• ISBN-13: 978-0195157659
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #136,756 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Law Enforcement & the Psychology of Death. Hmmm . . ., March 8, 2007

By	call me The Avi ("In my dreams I live in California......") - See all my reviews

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'.