Acknowledgement and Forensically-based Study of Ethnoracial Trauma from Police Excessive Force Actions can Build the Scaffolding for a Restorative Healing Process

Public safety in the 21st century is contingent upon perceived legitimacy, confidence in accountability, cross-cultural credibility/competence, and desired responses by the ethnoracial stakeholders whose perceptions of police are filtered by racially traumatizing incidents. Growing evidence reveals that past and present police violations of core relational tenets fuel both ethnoracial anxieties and criticism of public safety procedures. Globally, law enforcement personnel are charged to practice within a culturally responsive, research-based framework. Such a structure must reflect a psychohistorical understanding of the contextual nature of relationships between police and ethnoracial communities. Effective solutions hinge on acknowledging residual psychological damage from previous policing strategies, plus full inclusion of communities through structured dialogue. In this article, I present a psychocultural portrait of police and racial trauma cases, and review factors that perpetuate discriminatory and invalid police procedures that continue the racial trauma cycle. I assess the prevalence of racial trauma and healing using a prism of police misconduct reports over decades, then provide an ethnoracial critique of the psychological assessment processes used for police hiring and retention. I offer interventions as a foundation for facilitating restorative healing while revitalizing trust within diverse communities. I conclude with implications of this approach for practice, policy, and future research on police and racial trauma.

Keywords: Trauma, Racial Trauma, PTSD, Police, Law Enforcement, Cross-Cultural Policing.