A multi-level approach to officer wellbeing: POWER and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office

Beyond Us & Them is thrilled to be returning to Jacksonville, Florida, to deepen our work with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) in a robust, five-year project that will offer POWERful training in wellness, resilience and council to hundreds of officers. 

In 2021, JSO was one of the first law enforcement agencies to experience our groundbreaking POWER Training program. Funded by local philanthropists, Beyond Us & Them brought trainers to Jacksonville to train and support a cohort of diverse officers, chaplains, dispatchers and agency leaders in an immersive program designed to support wellbeing, enhance self-awareness and compassion and deepen police-community relations.

The pilot program was an extraordinary success. Research conducted by independent evaluators from UCLA reported striking results, describing significant improvement in mindfulness, emotion regulation and empathy, and reduction in perceived stress and anger. Participants reported a high degree of satisfaction and described remarkable shifts in their health and outlook. These results can be viewed in the evaluation report, linked here.

Rolling out the POWER officer wellbeing program

Law enforcement personnel from the los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO) participating in Beyond Us & Them's premier Peace Officer Wellness, Empathy & Resilience (POWER) training program leadership cohort
Law enforcement personnel from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) participate in Beyond Us & Them’s premiere Peace Officer Wellness, Empathy & Resilience (POWER) training program leadership cohort.

As a result of the success of the 2021 pilot program, generous local funders have committed to a multi-year expansion of the program that will resource 450-500 diverse JSO officers and staff with skills and leadership training to sustain and grow the POWER Training Program model over the course of five years, and beyond. The program will include multiple cohort trainings, train-the-trainer programs, mentorship, apprenticeship and extensive consultation.

Cohort One kicked off in June of 2024, with a second cohort starting in September. Prior to the initiation of these cohorts, Beyond Us & Them launched its premier leadership training cohort (pictured above). The leadership cohort includes nine JSO officers, along with three LAPD officers who participated in POWER’s LA pilot program — and who reported resonating with the material so much they asked to become POWER program trainers. The leadership cohort is made up of mostly active duty law enforcement and one recently-retired LAPD Sergeant, Ronald Kingi (front row, first on left). Most of the leadership cohort agree with Sgt. Kingi’s sentiments about the relevance and resonance of program materials. Sgt. Kingi states that “the first day I started using (the POWER training program materials), and I’ve been using them every day since. I’m talking about two years!”

On a recent zoom, Assistant Chief Randi Glossman (back row, far right), who has been a vocal champion of this program, remarked that she was “excited to see how many officers we can bring through this in the next five years and how much healthier our agency will become because of it.” Chief Glossman is quick to convey the full support of her boss, Sheriff TK Waters, who has encouraged her to integrate the program into JSO culture.

Feedback from Jacksonville Officers

Detective Rob Gutcher (back row, sixth from left), who participated in the pilot program, commented: “When we were going through the pilot program, I was going through a dark time in my career. I took a lot of the principles with me, and I saw the effects of being able to have deeper conversations. I would say my team found a sense of peace. Families grew stronger, and our relationships grew stronger. I really saw results.”

“We are better people for our loved ones after going through this program,” added Detective Sharmonique McDaniel (back row, eighth from left), a 17.5 year veteran of the force who was also part of the 2021 group. “I find myself utilizing skills I picked up in this course. When officers are open to the techniques, and have some space to be vulnerable, they see it works.”

Officer Gregory Hernandez (first row, second from left) believes that POWER is a great help and “the biggest preventative step right now.” Officer Hernandez was struck by officers’ openness to the healing power of “sharing and listening to the stories… it’s incredible to this day, even the toughest among us break down.”

HRV and Scientific Research into the POWER training program

Beyond Us & Them Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Ann Seide DR ANN SEIDE is an ABIM board-certified Internist for nearly 30 years, also boarded in Integrative Medicine, and currently the Medical Director at the Center for Behavioral Health and Long Term Care at Motion Picture Television Fund Hospital.

Beyond Us & Them Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. Ann Seide, who helped design POWER and is one of the program trainers, decided to conduct scientific research into the efficacy of the program after hearing anecdotal comments from LAPD officers “about reductions in chronic headaches, better sleep, reduced gastrointestinal issues, and resolution of heart dysrhythmias.”

Dr. Seide says, “as I heard them share these changes in their physical health, I became curious whether we might find ways to add biometric measurements to the psychosocial surveys. The changes they described are indicative of improved autonomic regulation, and I wanted to find an easily obtained, reproducible method of testing this. In the past, researchers have used cortisol sampling as well as other markers of inflammation in blood tests, but while these are great in a lab setting, I knew they were impractical in the field. During my fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the Andrew Weil Center in Tucson, Arizona, I was introduced to HeartMath, and became trained as a HeartMath Interventions Provider. Recording a person’s heart rate variability is a non-invasive window into the balance of their autonomic nervous system.”

According to Dr. Rollin McCraty (director of research at HeartMath), our hearts are not metronomes. Each interval between beats varies: sometimes your heart shifts from one beat to the next quickly, other times more slowly. Over a minute your average heart rate might be 70, but during that minute the time between neighboring beats varies. This is known as “heart rate variability” (HRV), and the bigger the variation (the faster it can change and the bigger the difference between fastest and slowest), the healthier you are. HRV is a function of balance in the autonomic nervous system: you can think of effective balance being the ability to raise heart rate and respond to crisis quickly when threatened, and conversely to shift that response when the threat goes away. Folks with low HRV are at increased risk of heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, stroke, dementia, and death from all causes. Practices that improve HRV have been shown to reduce these risks.

Understanding the health risks for officers

Law enforcement personnel with the Los Angeles Police Department participate in Beyond Us & Them's Peace Officer Wellness, Empathy & Resilience (POWER) training program
Law enforcement personnel with the Los Angeles Police Department participate in Beyond Us & Them’s Peace Officer Wellness, Empathy & Resilience (POWER) training program.

For Beyond Us & Them’s 2023 POWER cohort with officers from California State University San Marcos, and neighboring university campus police departments, Dr. Seide designed a protocol to measure HRV using a 5-minute assessment and a 1-minute deep breathing assessment (DBA). The 5-min protocol yields power-domain information, one aspect of which is called VLF (Very Low Frequency). This domain is a reflection of the heart’s intrinsic rhythm; low VLF frequency correlates with increased risk for all the diseases mentioned above (and that LE officers are at disproportionately high risk for, compared with the general population).

The sample size with the CSUSM group was relatively small, but nonetheless Dr. Seide saw an increase in participants’ VLF that correlated with subjective comments similar to what the LAPD officers reported – that they were sleeping better, had improved blood pressure, had lost weight, were no longer suffering from chronic GI issues. “I hope in future cohorts to add to our data set, and perhaps even re-measure HRV months out from the training, as I think that the improvement in VLF seen after 3 months persists or maybe even increases based on the continued improved health that some of our LAPD officers talk about,” she remarks.

The results of this research have been written up in a paper that has been peer reviewed and published in the open source Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being. This paper explains the findings from the research project, which Dr. Seide says “really adds a whole new dimension to how we understand” the value of the POWER program.

The four pillars of health & wellbeing

In constructing the POWER program, Beyond Us & Them realized the importance of an integrative approach to health. Dr. Seide explains that “When we say ‘integrative,’ what we mean is bringing to bear all interventions that impact health. As far as how we focus on officer health and wellbeing, we break that down into four pillars or categories: the physical, mental, emotional, and social (or energetic or relational).”

Physical health encompasses and embodies our surroundings, things that we can sense, feel, see, hear, taste and smell. This is often the easiest pillar to relate to, as it’s what we can experience most directly and obviously. But there is great complexity hidden in our physiology and interaction with all of the other pillars.

Our mental health encompasses our thoughts, perceptions, biases, inner dialogue, and blind spots. Adaptations to efficiency and routine can sometimes trap us in an “autopilot” state where we miss cues and our capacity to attune to self- and situational-awareness is compromised. We can also fall victim to unhealthy habits of ruminating, catastrophizing and distraction.

When we speak of emotional health, we attend to feelings of sadness, joy, fear, loneliness. We realize that when we speak of emotions, we’re asking people to access ways that their bodies experience things that aren’t intellectual. Functioning in a high-stress environment in which individuals are encountered at the height of emergent and dramatic situations requires literacy and facility in working with emotions. We also must be discerning in recognizing and addressing our own emotion regulation in a way that is safe and appropriate.

And finally, when we speak of social (or energetic or relational) health, we’re talking about relationships with others, as well as our relationship to the mysteries of life, and to the questions of why we are here, what draws us to protect and serve, what is our purpose, and what makes life worth living — what some call the “big questions.” This may include one’s spiritual practice, but that isn’t the case for everyone, and the ways in which these questions come up in our lives may or may not get addressed by our specific religious orientation or practice. These factors impact the other pillars of health in subtle but significant ways.

In speaking of an integrative approach to health, Dr. Seide points out that “we realize that all of these categories, or planes, are interconnected. We see that addressing our physical health has an impact on our mental health. And when we pay attention to our relationships, there are positive impacts on our emotional and physical wellbeing.” POWER Training is predicated on a comprehensive approach to all aspects of health and relies on these four pillars as a map of understanding for this integrative approach.

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Beyond Us and Them team

Beyond Us and Them team

Beyond Us and Them is the leading solution-focused organization providing dynamic and scalable practices to combat the loneliness epidemic and foster social connection.

It creates programs and delivers training for law enforcement officers, healthcare providers, educators, policymakers, and community-based organizations, among other populations and individuals, to cultivate wellness, relationality, compassion, and resilience. 

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