When UW-Madison psychology researcher Dan Grupe launched a pilot study examining the effects of mindfulness-based training on a small group of Madison police officers, his biggest question wasn’t whether the program would help officers better cope with job stress. It was whether police officers would buy into training that involved yoga, meditation and talking about their feelings.
“It was really more of a feasibility study than anything else,” Grupe tells Isthmus. “We were using it to really answer the questions: ‘Will officers find this training to be acceptable? Is it something they feel like they can integrate into their lives and work? Is it something they find helpful?’”
The study, a collaboration between UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds and the Madison Police Department, took place during the fall of 2016 and spring of 2017 and involved 30 officers, all volunteers. The results have not yet been fully analyzed and peer reviewed, but Grupe says “most of the preliminary results show improvement.”
“We don’t have the final results to report right now, but what we have looked at is officers’ self-reported [data] — or the perceived impact of the training,” Grupe says. “But in some ways that’s the most important thing.”
Officers who completed the training reported “big improvements” in the amount and quality of nighttime sleep and reported feeling less tired during the day. They also reported feeling “less exhausted by work,” which bodes well for battling burnout, Grupe says. Objective data measures are still being analyzed; this includes sleep data from Fitbits that participants wore during the training period and data from computerized tests that measured officers’ ability to sustain attention and perform tasks. But the early results are so promising that the study is being expanded.
The next phase starts this spring, and Grupe is aiming to enroll about 120 officers from the Madison Police Department, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and the UW-Madison Police Department. The study will take two years and will be funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice. Grupe says the ability to engage a larger subject pool is “great for the science,” and the inclusion of three “very different kinds of police departments” will provide deeper understanding of the research and its efficacy. “This [expanded study] will speak to the question of whether this works beyond the Madison Police Department,” he says. “It’s very exciting.”
Brian Austin, a Madison police lieutenant and the department’s point person for the mindfulness study, says the department has been “very, very pleased” with feedback from the officers who participated in the study. He hasn’t done the training himself, since the pilot study focused on front-line officers, but he hopes to be part of a future study. Even if not selected for the next round, he says he will seek out mindfulness training on his own.
“I have had friends that have done it, and they have nothing but positive things to say about it,” he says, adding that meditation wasn’t something he would have considered prior to the study. “I certainly wasn’t opposed to it, but when you look at the results — not only in our department, but [in other mindfulness studies] across the country — I think as many officers as we can expose, the better,” he says.
The Center for Healthy Minds is a nonprofit research center founded by UW-Madison neuroscientist Richard Davidson with the goal of advancing research and developing tools to enhance well-being. The police study’s mindfulness-based stress reduction training is based on the same eight-week course the Center offers to the public, but slightly tailored for law enforcement. The weekly, two-hour classes began with seated and walking meditation, gentle movement and yoga. After the activities, officers also broke into groups to discuss their reactions to the practices. Grupe says the goal was to encourage officers to think about the mindfulness activities as if they were part of their job description. “We wanted them to think about these practices not as something you do while at home,” he says. “It’s not something you’re doing completely divorced from work, but it’s something relevant for work and integrated in some ways into work.”
Instructors employed a few strategies to make the mindfulness curriculum more palatable for police. They poked gentle fun at stereotypical views about meditation — like the idea that you have to sit in lotus pose to achieve mental clarity — and were careful when framing the lessons, playing up the positive outcomes that the training could provide. “We really tried to emphasize that this is about building awareness, enhancing attention and developing skills,” Grupe says.
The Center for Healthy Minds pilot study wasn’t the first time Madison police officers have tried meditation. The late police Capt. Cheri Maples, who was also a Buddhist teacher, introduced meditation to the department about 15 years ago, before the practice was mainstream. But not all police departments are like Madison’s.
“The Madison Police Department is a unique police department for sure, and definitely a lot easier with this group than if we were trying to do it in Chicago or a more rural department,” Grupe says. “But it is still a police department, and still a different population of people than those who typically show up for a mindfulness meditation class.”
Austin agrees that MPD has a unique culture — it’s been nationally recognized for progressive policies including an emphasis on hiring women, people of color and college graduates — but he believes other departments will get on board with mindfulness when they see evidence of its many benefits. He points out that police officers have higher rates of stress-related illnesses compared to many other professions. And while policing is inherently stressful, “Anything we can do to positively impact that can be a good thing,” he says. Austin also points out that police culture is changing along with society. It’s no longer taboo to talk about stress in the workplace, and health techniques once considered alternative are becoming mainstream. “Generationally, attitudes are changing,” he says. “And that’s reflected in policing.”
The Center for Healthy Minds studies come at a time of national conversation about racial bias among law enforcement officers and outrage over police killings of unarmed people. When asked if mindfulness could help solve these problems, Grupe says that’s not what’s driving the research. But he says if officers are trained to better cope with stress on the job, the benefits of mindfulness will spill over into “everything they do and touch.”
