- Conference
- 2022 Police & Justice Service Group Conference
- Date
- 22 July 2022
- Decision
- Carried
Conference police crime scene examiners are often one of the first attendees at crime scenes. During their careers they photograph hundreds of scenes and are exposed to a variety of traumatic and distressing situations.
Scene examiners are dealing with the examination of dead bodies, close up photography of post-mortems, and fingerprinting the deceased. They are hearing first-hand the circumstances of these crimes, dealing with subsequent follow up, and that can include dealing with the personal stories and the emotional turmoil of victims and their families.
First Responders are people with specialised training who are among the first to arrive and provide assistance at the scene of an emergency. Other roles, such as the Family Liaison Officer role acts as a contact point between the family and the police investigation for serious incidents including for example murders or unexplained deaths, or disasters involving multiple fatalities.
In Scotland, people in these roles – typically officer roles – receive a higher level of health and wellbeing support including incident debriefing in recognition of the high stress or trauma that exposure to these situations can cause on health and wellbeing. Yet despite their role at a crime scene, the same level of support for health and wellbeing is not afforded to crime scene examiners. In Scotland, scene examiners are single crewed so they cannot even rely on other colleagues for a short debrief afterwards.
Scene examiners are not given enough time to properly and meaningfully engage with support mechanisms to identify and reduce the impact of stress on their general mental health that attendance at a crime scene causes. Requests for support are typically answered with, “they knew the demands of the job when they accepted the role”, and “it’s something they just have to put up with”.
Conference, in reality there are very little analytical studies of what impact performing a crime scene examiner role has on health and wellbeing. Not everyone is aware when they have a mental health issue. Sometimes scene examiners are afraid of being seen as weak if they say crime scene work is affecting their health. And, due to the nature of the role, scene examiners can’t discuss what they have seen at the examination site with family, friends or other colleagues not directly involved.
Conference, our scene examiners should be brought into line with other ‘First Responders’ and be guaranteed the health support they require during the course of their career.
Conference calls for the SGE:
1. To develop and undertake survey to identify the health and wellbeing impact of crime scene work on scene examiners.
2. To produce a report, including a regional breakdown, from the survey results and circulate this to the SGE and all police branches, providing an evidence base to allow police branches to negotiate for enhanced health and wellbeing provision on a par with First Responders.
3. To provide advice to branches working with employers to provide support for scene examiners which robustly protects not just their health and safety at scenes but their health and wellbeing throughout their careers.