The police officer as survivor: Death confrontations and the police subculture

Encounters with death have profound and indelible psychic consequences. Each encounter with the death of another is, symbolically, an encounter with one's own mortality. These psychic transformations, which Robert Jay Lifton terms the “psychology of survival,” result in the evolution and development of new modes of adaptation, thought, and feeling within the survivor and among groups of survivors. This article applies Lifton's concept of survival and death immersion to the subculture of urban policing. Few if any occupations outside the medical field entail such frequent and intense exposure to death, especially in its more unpleasant forms. The effect of such exposure on individual officers and upon the subculture as a whole can be both functional and deleterious. Themes, images and symbols of death pervade the folklore of the police subculture, and to a lesser extent, the anecdotal and descriptive academic literature of policing. Exposure to death serves a functional and integrative purpose in the socialization of young officers, constituting an important rite of passage. It also enables officers to achieve and maintain an essential and protective “professional distance” from assorted aspects of their work, including the debilitating fear of their own demise.