What Should a Police Department Wellness Program Include?
What a police wellness program should include: assess risk, build a playbook, implement in person, track results. Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
A police department wellness program should follow one sequence: assess the department's actual risk, build a customized written playbook, implement it in person, and track the results. It should cover the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions of the job, and it should be sized and funded for your department, not copied from an agency ten times larger. A program missing any one of those steps is why so many sit unused.
Why do police departments need a wellness program at all?
Because the risk is built into the job. Officers are exposed to trauma, conflict and high-stakes decisions as a routine part of the work, not as an occasional bad day. That is occupational risk, and a plan built for average workplace stress was never going to meet it.
It is also a staffing issue. The Police Executive Research Forum's 2024 workforce survey found that responding agencies reported 18.4% more resignations than in 2019. Small agencies reported 60.4% more resignations and 66.7% more retirements than in 2019. Officers who feel invested in tend to stay, even when a nearby department offers a little more. Departures usually say more about culture and support than about a pay gap alone.
Research on moral injury points the same way. In a study of U.S. healthcare workers, those who witnessed a potentially morally injurious event had 1.66 times the relative risk of turnover intentions a year later. That study was not of police officers, but the mechanism it describes, carrying scenes that conflict with your own values, is familiar to anyone who has worked a patrol shift.
What should a police department wellness program include?
Four steps, in order. Each one produces something a chief can review and defend.
| Step | What happens | What you end up with |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Assess | Identify where exposure and risk sit across ranks and roles, including dispatch, command staff and retirees | A clear picture of your department's risk and current gaps |
| 2. Build the playbook | Design a sustainable, funded plan sized to your department | A customized written playbook and a budget you can defend |
| 3. Implement in person | Bring the plan to your people face to face, including training geared to specific ranks | A program officers have seen, met and used |
| 4. Track results | Measure usage and outcomes over time | Data for the next council or budget meeting |
Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual
A whole-person program treats these four dimensions as connected. Physical health covers sleep, fitness and the toll of shift work. Mental and emotional health cover stress, trauma exposure and how officers decompress. The spiritual dimension covers meaning, values and the moral weight of what officers see and decide, which is the part most programs skip and the part that rest alone does not resolve.
What federal guidance already recommends
Under the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017, the Department of Justice's COPS Office delivered a report to Congress with 22 recommendations. The law asked the report to address crisis lines for officers, annual mental health checks, expanding peer mentoring programs and privacy protections for those programs. A companion report documented eleven case studies of law enforcement wellness programs. Those topics are a good checklist for what a department's plan should at least consider.
What about small and volunteer departments?
They need a program just as much, and usually have the fewest resources to build one. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 46% of local police departments employed fewer than 10 full-time-equivalent sworn officers in 2020. On the fire side, the U.S. Fire Administration's registry shows 70.0% of registered fire departments are volunteer and another 15.5% are mostly volunteer.
These organizations rarely have a wellness budget line or a staff member whose job includes wellness. That changes what the program should look like:
- Sized to the roster. A nineteen-officer department and a two-thousand-officer department do not carry the same risk profile, and a plan built for one will not fit the other.
- Fundable. The playbook should show where the money comes from and how the program sustains itself after the first year.
- Light on administration. If running the program requires a full-time coordinator the department does not have, it will not last.
- Built for volunteers too. Volunteer firefighters and reserve officers carry the same scenes home, often without the same access to support.
- Inclusive of retirees. The weight of the job does not end at retirement, and a program can plan for that.
Why do so many department wellness programs sit unused?
Usually because one of the four steps was skipped. A department buys an app without an assessment, or holds a training without a written plan, or launches a program and never measures it. The result looks like a program on paper and functions like a resource: available, rarely used, hard to defend.
Culture is the other reason. "I'm fine" is the standard answer in a profession built on toughing it out. A program that waits for officers to raise their hands will mostly hear from the officers who were already comfortable asking. That is why in-person implementation matters. A plan has to be brought to people by someone they have met, in language that reads as strength and performance rather than therapy-speak.
How do you get a wellness program funded by city council?
Walk in with a case, not a request for trust. The assessment produces the data, and the playbook shows exactly what the program costs and what it is meant to change. Councils fund what they can see measured. A chief who can show the department's turnover, overtime and usage numbers is having a budget conversation, not asking for a favor.
Frequently asked questions
What is the first step in building a police wellness program?
The first step is an assessment of your department's actual risk. It identifies which roles carry the most exposure and what support already exists, so the program is built for your officers rather than for an average department.
Does a police wellness program need a clinician?
A program should connect officers to licensed clinical care when they need it, but the program itself is a strategy, not treatment. A chief does not need a clinical background to lead one. He needs a partner who does the assessment and builds the plan with him.
Should a police wellness program include dispatchers and civilian staff?
Yes. Dispatchers and civilian staff are exposed to the same calls and the same pressure, often without the same recognition. An assessment should look at exposure across the whole department, not just sworn officers.
How long does it take to build a department wellness program?
It depends on the department's size and what already exists. The assessment comes first, and its findings set the scope of the playbook and the implementation plan.
Karen Hurley builds department wellness programs through PIF Samaritan Services, starting with the Wellness Program Assessment. You can read more about her work with police, fire and emergency management on the public safety page, or book a conversation to talk through your department.
Sources
- Goodison, S. E. Local Police Departments Personnel, 2020. Bureau of Justice Statistics. PDF.
- U.S. Fire Administration. National Fire Department Registry Summary, January 2024. PDF.
- Police Executive Research Forum. Workforce survey update, July 5, 2025. policeforum.org.
- U.S. Department of Justice. "Department of Justice Releases Reports Focused on Improving Safety and Wellness of the Nation's 800,000 Law Enforcement Officers," April 17, 2019. justice.gov.
- Usset, T. J., et al. "Burnout and turnover risks for healthcare workers in the United States: downstream effects from moral injury exposure." Scientific Reports, 2024. PubMed Central.
