“I’ve Seen More Dead People than I thought I Would”: Vicarious Trauma Exposure among Police Support Personnel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Civilian administrative assistants who work for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, known as Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs), are frequently exposed to materials and/or experiences that are potentially psychologically traumatic. Drawing from 49 semi-structured interviews with DSAs, we analyze how these civilian personnel experience exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events, most notably, vicarious trauma. Specifically, we overview the types of exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events and materials experienced by DSAs, including the impact of incidents involving children, and the occupational duties through which these exposures occur; we unpack the nuances and variability in DSAs’ occupational work, which informs such exposures; and we draw from DSAs’ experiences to offer recommendations for ameliorating the mental health toll of civilian police work. The study adds to the limited academic literature on the occupational and mental health experiences of civilian personnel, who serve a vital, but underrecognized, role in supporting police operations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".