HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology for Clinical Settings
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1587452
This article is part of the Research TopicInterdisciplinary Approaches to Policing and Mental Health CrisesView all 5 articles
The General Intervention Model of Policing: A Narrative Review of the Literature 1
Provisionally accepted
- 1Brandenburg State Police University, Oranienburg, Germany
- 2University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration North Rhine-Westphalia, Aachen, Germany
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Dealing with individuals suffering mental illness, being in psychological emergencies or crisis and any other exceptional circumstances is one of the most common professional requirements of police officers. Their personnel selection, education and advanced training must be consistently targeted toward successful coping with the real-world demands of police work. The question arises of what is necessary for police officers to be able to deal with individuals in psychological distress or exceptional situations without the use of force and the associated consequences on all those involved. In this article, we present a General Intervention Model of Policing (GIMP) consisting of three building blocks: (i) knowledge, (ii) processing, (iii) action. In this context, we propose that these empirically informed building blocks are necessary to achieve the aforementioned goal from the perspective of the police. We conceptualize the GIMP as a cognitive action model that particularly describes the mental processes of police officers involved. The model can be used as a basis for the development and empirical testing of a police requirement profile, as well as for the content of police recruitment and training. After presenting the building blocks of the model, it is placed in the context of other policing models and discussed.
Keywords: Police, operations, Model, knowledge, processing, action, Crisis, Mentally ill
Received: 04 Mar 2025; Accepted: 04 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Schade and Thielgen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Stefan Schade, Brandenburg State Police University, Oranienburg, Germany
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