By Theresa Rézeau

We often imagine courage as something dramatic: a soldier charging into battle, a firefighter entering a burning building, a rescuer pulling someone from floodwaters. Yet there is another kind of courage that receives far less attention. It is the courage to arrive after the worst has already happened, to enter the room everyone else wants to leave, and to remain composed while another person’s world is collapsing.

Much of a police officer’s work takes place beyond the flashing blue lights and the headlines. It happens behind front doors, on bridges, beside railway tracks, in hospital corridors and on ordinary roads that, by morning, will look ordinary again. An officer may encounter the woman who finally opens the door after years of violence, the frightened child who cannot explain what has happened, the elderly person found days after anyone last heard their voice, or the wreckage of a car in which, only minutes earlier, someone had been laughing, arguing, listening to music or simply driving home.

Then comes the part few of us have to imagine. Someone must stay. Someone must look. Someone must ask the questions that have to be asked and hear answers they may never forget. There may be photographs to take, statements to record, a terrified person to reassure, a body to identify. Somewhere else, a family may still be going about its evening, unaware that a knock on the door is about to divide its life permanently into before and after.

Sometimes the most terrible sentence of someone’s life has to be spoken by a stranger in uniform.

And then another call comes.

We debate the police constantly: their powers, their conduct, their failures and their use of force. We should. Those entrusted with authority must also be accountable for how it is exercised. But the public conversation rarely lingers on another reality of policing: what repeated proximity to violence, death, fear and grief does to the person required to witness it.

What happens to all those faces when the shift is over?

The uniform comes off, but memory has no locker in which it can be left. An officer may return home to dinner waiting on the table, a child asking for help with homework, a partner talking about something that happened during the day. Eventually someone may ask the most ordinary question imaginable: How was your day?

There are days for which no ordinary answer could possibly be adequate.

So the officer says very little. Tomorrow the uniform goes back on. The radio crackles again. Another address is given. Somewhere, another stranger is about to experience one of the worst moments of their life, and someone will be sent to meet them there.

We expect professionalism from the police. We expect composure, judgement and restraint, and rightly so. But beneath the uniform remains a human nervous system that remembers, a mind capable of carrying images home, and a person who cannot simply decide not to have seen what they have seen.

The uniform may conceal emotion. It cannot make the person inside it invulnerable.

More than a century before radios, patrol cars and body-worn cameras transformed policing, an American painter captured something remarkably simple about the person whose task is to watch over others.

William P. Chappel’s City Watchman, painted in the 1870s, is a small work, barely larger than a sheet of paper. Chappel, an American artist born in 1801, painted scenes of New York as he remembered it from the early nineteenth century. Here, a watchman leaves his sentry box on a snowy evening. He carries a stick and wears the leather helmet associated with New York’s early watchmen. His task was to patrol the streets, watching for fires, break-ins and other dangers in the years before the city’s modern professional police force emerged.

There is nothing heroic about the way Chappel paints him.

That is precisely what makes the image powerful.

No crowd watches him leave. There is no ceremony, no horse, no raised weapon and no triumph. Snow covers the street. Buildings stand quietly around him. The watchman is simply a small human figure stepping into a city whose inhabitants largely disappear behind closed doors at night.

He watches while others sleep.

The painting belongs to another century, but the fundamental arrangement remains familiar. Society appoints certain people to walk towards what everyone else hopes will stay away.

The dangers have changed. The uniform has changed. The institutions surrounding the officer have changed. Yet the strange psychological bargain remains: we ask one human being to encounter repeatedly what another human being may struggle to endure once.

Modern research has begun to measure the consequences of that bargain. In a major UK study of more than 18,000 police officers and staff, around one in five of those screened showed symptoms consistent with probable post-traumatic stress disorder or complex PTSD. The figure gives scale to something that is otherwise difficult to see, because trauma does not necessarily announce itself at the station door. It may travel home quietly.

Statistics can count those who are suffering. They cannot tell us which image refuses to leave someone’s mind at three in the morning.

Nor does trauma always arrive dramatically. It can become sleeplessness, irritability, withdrawal or exhaustion. It can become silence at the dinner table. Sometimes the mind becomes very good at putting things into compartments because another shift begins tomorrow and another person will need help. National wellbeing data from policing in England and Wales reinforces that picture of accumulated strain, with large numbers of officers and staff reporting exhaustion and burnout. The important fact is not simply that policing can be tiring. It is that repetition matters. One terrible encounter may eventually be followed by another, and then another.

Behind each statistic is someone Chappel could never have imagined: an officer sitting beneath fluorescent lights completing paperwork after witnessing something terrible; someone driving home replaying a scene; someone standing in a supermarket later that evening among people choosing bread and milk while carrying knowledge of how abruptly an ordinary life can end.

Police officers do not occupy the uncomplicated moral position of rescuers in our collective imagination. They possess powers that most citizens do not. They can detain, search and arrest. Their decisions can profoundly alter another person’s life. History contains examples of those powers being abused, and contemporary policing continues to face legitimate scrutiny over misconduct, discrimination, excessive force and failures of institutional accountability.

Compassion for the officer cannot require silence about those realities.

But neither should accountability require us to pretend that the person wearing the uniform has ceased to be human.

Both things can be true.

Power must be scrutinised, and the people entrusted with exercising it can themselves be wounded by what they encounter.

Indeed, those two truths belong together. A society should care about the psychological wellbeing of police officers not despite expecting restraint and good judgement from them, but partly because it expects those things. We ask officers to make decisions in moments of fear, confusion and sometimes violence. Their ability to remain psychologically healthy is not merely a private matter for them and their families. It touches the people they will meet tomorrow.

This returns us to Chappel’s watchman.
Look again at how small he is.

The city surrounding him is larger than he is. The night is larger than he is. Even his sentry box seems to offer only temporary shelter. He has not defeated darkness. He has simply agreed to walk into it.

There is something profoundly human in that image.

Protection has always carried a paradox. The protector is expected to stand between danger and everyone else, yet standing there means being closer to danger than everyone else.

We understand this instinctively when we speak about soldiers returning from war. We have developed a language, however imperfect, for what combat can do to memory and the nervous system. Yet the police officer may encounter trauma differently: not during one distant deployment, but woven through ordinary life. A terrible scene on Tuesday may be followed by school traffic on Wednesday, a missing child on Thursday, a domestic dispute on Friday and someone’s sudden death before the weekend is over.

Then comes home.

That is the detail we overlook most easily.

Behind the officer is another world: partners, parents, children, friendships, birthdays, bills, arguments, Sunday lunches and ordinary domestic life. Trauma does not necessarily remain at the station simply because the person carrying it does not describe it. Sometimes families live beside experiences they never witnessed and stories they will never completely hear.

How many other people’s worst days can one person carry before they begin to alter their own?

There may be no clean answer.

The watchman in Chappel’s painting is walking away from his shelter.

We do not know what he will encounter.
We do not know what he has already encountered.
And we do not know what he will carry back.

That uncertainty is why this modest nineteenth-century painting speaks so clearly now. Chappel does not give us a hero. He gives us a person performing a duty. Small against the city, exposed to the weather, walking towards whatever may be waiting beyond the edge of the painting.

Nearly two centuries later, the equipment is more sophisticated and the institutions immeasurably more complex, but somewhere tonight another officer will receive an address.

A door will open.

Something will be seen that cannot be unseen.

Eventually the shift will end. The radio will become silent. The uniform will come off. Somewhere a key will turn in an ordinary front door.

Dinner may still be warm.
Someone will look up and ask:

How was your day?

And somewhere between what was witnessed and what can be spoken, the officer will have to decide what to carry into the house.

The photograph that prompted this essay: Theresa Rézeau with two armed police officers at the Houses of Parliament, London, 2016.