Early in my policing career, which has seen most of it within a response/operational environment, I saw my first dead body. I took that incident home. I wasn’t aware I had, but my family were concerned at the fact that I was washing my hands constantly. They were shocked at my sudden tendency towards additional personal hygiene as I subconsciously tried to wash away what I had perhaps wished I had never had to touch.
Later still in my service I was involved in follow-up enquires after a serious road traffic collision when I saw things you don’t expect to see inside a car which had until recently been on a road. When you look and learn from those senior colleagues around you who had become hardened to it – so as to be almost blind to the horrors – but who never fail to feel the effects just the same. They take those home too.
Worse was to come when I was one of the first responders at a fatal road traffic accident and a doctor stopped my efforts at life support as, with their enhanced skills and equipment, they saw it as hopeless. Boy, do you take that home.
You attend the report of a house on fire with persons reported and you arrive there some minutes before your fire service colleagues and as you battle the smoke you hear noises that linger long after the smell of the smoke has been washed from your uniform. You take those noises home too.
Then you are called in to investigate the utterly tragic circumstances around a sudden infant death and as part of those enquiries you see things that you simply wish you hadn’t had to see.
One of the first responders at a mercifully rare, but nevertheless mass-fatality type incident, you see things there that you simply not only take home, but that you simply never ‘un-see’ if such a word exists.
Now I am just an ordinary officer with some tales of approaching nearly thirty years in policing. I am not unique, I have done nothing that countless others will have done far more of before me, that others will do today and that indeed many others will do tomorrow and the day after as they build their own experiences of policing and keeping people safe.
These officers will take it all home.
Home is where the support starts perhaps, because none of us have done this alone. But that said, I am proud to be part of an organisation now that is unafraid to talk about what they have had to take home. Further, that in taking it home, they bravely bring it back to work the following day and share their experiences with perhaps colleagues or maybe even a counsellor – not only to reduce the impact of what they had seen, heard or felt – but to demonstrate to others that its absolutely the right thing to do.
I am indebted to one-line manager who directed me to a counsellor after one such incident. That brief engagement was thankfully all I needed. I recognise and am humbled by many that needed so much more.
I am proud that so many are now more comfortable in speaking about incidents they have taken home. It reduces any stigma at all in the act of talking about them, it reduces the silence and establishes once and for all that it is okay to talk – and to accept that in such talking about whatever it is/was that you took home, that there are avenues and support structures now to help you deal with that which you wish you hadn’t.
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