Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Vicarious trauma among civilian police staff is widespread: 48 of 49 Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs) reported exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events (PPTEs) through routine job duties.
- Exposure occurs through everyday administrative tasks: Reviewing graphic photos, transcribing detailed statements, answering crisis calls, and handling evidence were primary pathways of trauma exposure.
- Child-related cases were the most psychologically distressing: Incidents involving child abuse or child fatalities were consistently described as harder to process, more intrusive, and more likely to affect participants’ worldview and home life.
- Psychological impacts mirrored known trauma responses: Participants reported intrusive imagery, sleep disruption, heightened vigilance, emotional numbing, and lasting changes in how they viewed death and safety.
- Organizational recognition and support were limited: Many civilian staff received little to no training on vicarious trauma and were often excluded from critical incident debriefings despite direct exposure through their work.
It It shows up in small ways.
My refusal to let anyone in my family get a motorcycle. The tight feeling in my chest when I pass a certain stretch of railroad tracks. The cases that replay at night when the house is quiet. The intrusive flashes of gruesome photos, suspect statements, words I wish I could unread.
Those are my small things.
They’re remnants of my time as a crime analyst. Working in the RTCC. Watching fatal motorcycle crashes and train collisions unfold. Hearing the details of homicides and sexual assaults through statements and case files. Processing domestic violence reports. Reviewing child abuse cases.
It wasn’t just me or other crime analysts that were exposed. I worked closely with Community Service Officers who answered the department’s main phone line and sat alongside me in the RTCC. They took crime scene photos. They responded to traffic accidents, many of which were gruesome. They were often the first voice someone heard on the worst day of their life.
We have made meaningful progress in recognizing the psychological toll policing can take on officers. That progress matters.
But trauma exposure inside a police building is not limited to sworn.
I’ve worked with dispatchers who listened as victims were being attacked and never found out how the call ended. I’ve seen officers attend critical incident debriefs after a traumatic event while dispatchers and crime scene technicians, who heard it, processed it, documented it, were not invited.
This study names what many agencies already know but haven’t formally acknowledged: civilian staff experience trauma because they are embedded in the work.
The Study: “I’ve Seen More Dead People Than I Thought I Would”
Laura Huey, Mark Norman, Rosemary Ricciardelli, and Dale C. Spencer interviewed 49 female Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs) working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police between 2020 and 2021. Using confidential, semi-structured interviews, they examined job roles, workplace stressors, and exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events (PPTEs).
DSAs are civilian administrative personnel. They answer the detachment phone line, staff the front counter, manage case files, print crime scene photos, relay information to officers, and sometimes handle evidence.
Civilian employees now make up over 30% of the RCMP workforce, and similar roles exist across the US (records technicians, CSOs) and UK (police staff, PCSOs). Yet trauma research has focused almost exclusively on sworn officers. In interviews with 49 Detachment Services Assistants, 48 reported exposures to potentially psychologically traumatic events from their daily job duties.
This is vicarious trauma, the cumulative impact of repeated exposure to others’ trauma.
And in this study, that exposure wasn’t occasional. It was routine.
The findings that follow show two things: what types of traumatic events they were exposed to and how that exposure occurred through everyday job tasks.
What They Were Exposed To
One of the clearest patterns in the study was that participants divided their experiences into two categories, adult cases and child-related cases, with incidents involving children consistently described as harder to process and more likely to linger.
Before getting into specific stories, it’s important to understand the scope.
For adult cases, the most common exposures included accidental deaths (especially fatal motor vehicle collisions), homicides, suicides, domestic violence, and sexual assaults. These exposures happened through routine job tasks such as reviewing files, transcribing statements, printing and labeling photographs, answering phones, working the front counter, and monitoring radio traffic. Many said they had no idea this would be part of the job when they accepted the position.
For Lisa, the exposure came through photographs. She was responsible for reviewing and labeling images from a head-on collision in which a victim was ejected from the vehicle and struck by a semi-truck. She described the task as “grotesque.” 34% of the participants said they had routine exposure to graphic photos.
For Lucia, the exposure was relational. After fatal accidents, the personal effects of the deceased were often stored at the detachment. When family members came to retrieve them, it wasn’t always an officer who met them at the counter.
“It’s not the officer that’s going to be meeting with this grieving family,” she explained. “…It’s us…”
Others described transcribing homicide files word-for-word, including suspect statements. Janice recalled typing as a suspect proudly described how he committed murder. Years later, she said she can still picture it vividly.
“Every time I think about that file, I just want to gag…”
Answering the detachment’s phone line exposed staff to distressing situations. One woman took a call from a father sobbing after discovering his son’s body. Another stayed on the line with a domestic violence victim hiding in her bathroom while coordinating officers over the radio because the station could not transfer the call directly to emergency dispatch.
After these events, they still had to go back to answering phones. Still had to greet people at the counter. Still had to continue working.
The Cases Involving Children
While participants described routine exposure to traumatic adult cases, incidents involving children were consistently identified as the most psychologically distressing with sexual abuse of children being the worst. Child-related cases were described as harder to compartmentalize, more likely to intrude at home, and more likely to alter how participants viewed their own families, safety, and sense of normalcy.
Several women described prolonged transcription of graphic statements in which children detailed abuse in explicit terms. One participant spent eight hours typing a young child’s account of sexual assault. The task required precision and repetition; she could not skim or disengage.
Reflecting on the experience, she said,
“How anybody would think that when you go home to your own kids at night that doesn’t sit with you.”
The experiences did not go away when the shift ended.
Fatal incidents involving children compounded the strain, particularly in small rural communities where staff often knew the families personally. One participant described a farming accident where a 16-year and 10-year were killed and she knew the family.
Across interviews, participants described changes in worldview: increased vigilance, intrusive imagery, sleep disruption, and emotional numbing.
One woman explained,
“I have a very different view now of death… I don’t seem to have a lot of feelings about it anymore.”
That response is not indifference. It reflects a common psychological adaptation to repeated exposure to disturbing material, a dampening of emotional reactivity as a way to keep functioning. The study makes clear that for many civilian staff, child-related cases were not simply difficult assignments; they were profoundly destabilizing experiences. Despite the frequency and intensity of these exposures, many participants reported receiving little to no training on vicarious trauma, psychological risk, or coping strategies prior to encountering this material. The expectation was implicit: this is part of the job.
The Organizational Gap
Beyond documenting exposure, the study identifies a structural problem: civilian trauma is often unrecognized within the organization.
Many reported being left out of critical incident debriefings, even when they had transcribed the statements, handled the evidence, or took the initial call. Formal peer support and psychological services were often framed around those who attended the scene. Because civilian staff were “not on scene,” their reactions were more easily minimized.
Participants described their work being characterized as clerical or administrative, despite the fact that it regularly involved processing graphic sexual assaults, child abuse disclosures, suicides, and fatal collisions. This framing contributed to the perception that their distress was less operational and therefore less deserving of structured support.
Training was another point of concern. As described earlier, exposure occurred through their daily job duties. However, many participants reported receiving little to no preparation for vicarious trauma. There were no systematic warnings about graphic content, no standardized education on cumulative exposure, and limited proactive mental health training tailored to civilian roles.
One participant summarized the disconnect clearly:
“We’re not just sitting behind some computer… typing away pretty little notes. We’re dealing with victims…we take that home with us.”
The study’s broader finding is not that officer trauma is overstated. It is that trauma frameworks within policing have been too narrowly defined. When exposure is conceptualized only as physical presence at a scene, organizations overlook the psychological load carried by those who read, hear, document, and relay traumatic material every day. Expanding wellness efforts to explicitly include civilian personnel is not about redistributing support. It is about aligning organizational policy with the operational reality the study documents.
What Agencies Can Do
The study doesn’t just tell us that civilian personnel are exposed to trauma. It shows us how to mitigate some of the harm could be if organizations prepared and supported them.
Preparation matters. Mandatory training on what potentially psychologically traumatic events (PPTEs) look like, what vicarious trauma is, and how to cope is critical. Simple thing, like knowing how to pace transcription, take micro-breaks, or identify early warning signs of stress, can make a world of difference. As well as including warning labels on files that contain potentially traumatic materials like graphic photos or involving the abuse of children.
Inclusion matters. When critical incidents happen, civilians are often in the middle of it, listening to officers on the radio, taking emergency calls, handling evidence, but they’re left out of debriefs. Being in the room, hearing that it’s okay to be affected, getting guidance on what to do next; it all normalizes the stress instead of letting it fester.
Support matters. Generic “call EAP if you need it” links aren’t enough. Staff need confidential, trauma-informed mental health resources they can access without fear of judgment. Routine psychological check-ins such as screening for burnout, anxiety, depression, or early PTSD symptoms can catch problems before they become crises.
And most importantly: acknowledgment matters. Make it clear that your agency understands that civilian staff experience trauma too. Their work is hard, emotional, and sometimes grotesque. Recognizing it reduces isolation, and isolation amplifies harm. Something as simple as validating the experience in team meetings, including civilians in wellness initiatives, or even just checking in regularly can remind staff they are not carrying it alone.
Training, inclusion, support, and acknowledgment are small changes that can protect the mental health of staff who are quietly holding the emotional weight of the work every day.
The Office for Victims of Crime offers a Vicarious Trauma Toolkit designed to help law enforcement agencies support both sworn and civilian staff in addressing vicarious trauma:
Final Thoughts
I still remember the explicit details of victim statements.
I still remember watching fatal crashes unfold from a room full of screens.
I wasn’t on scene. But I was there.
And so are the people behind the front counter, the phone line, the reports, the radio. They hear it. They read it. They process it. And then they go home and try to be present with their own families.
This isn’t about comparing trauma. It’s simply about recognizing that exposure takes many forms.
If you work alongside civilian staff, a little empathy can go a long way. A check-in after a hard call. An invitation to the debrief. A reminder that the wellness resources apply to them too.
Sometimes just knowing that someone sees what you’re carrying makes it lighter.
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