Among the many pressing issues raised by the controversy of police mishandling of an arrestee named Richard “Randy” Cox, one has gone largely unspoken: how the stress of the job impacts officers’ mental health.
WNHH FM’s “pundits” — LoveBabz LoveTalk host and Inner-City News Editor Babz Rawls-Ivy (a former city police commissioner), journalist Markeshia Ricks, and Lucy Gellman, editor of the Arts Paper — did talk about that issue. They did so on the latest edition of the weekly headline-parsing program “Pundit Thursday.”
They raised the mental health question while analyzing how respected officers could disbelieve a man who had just been paralyzed in the prisoner transport van, then demand that he stand up, drag him on the floor, and cuff his feet rather than help him get immediate medical attention.
Officers often confront traumatic incidents in their job, including involving young children, they noted. It can “rub them raw” and “erase the humanity.” Police culture often encourages officers to suck it up rather than seek counseling. The pundits called for “normalizing” mental health help with processing the trauma they experience, as part of an improved police culture.
The pundits also examined the racial and policy questions widely discussed in the Cox case, and weighed in other recent stories involving Independence Day, alder foreign policy, stymied local economic developments, and the connection between poverty and violence. Click on the video at the top of this story to watch the full episode.