Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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Training mandated by police commissioner who believes her force is ‘institutionally racist’  Emily Spurrell, Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner Source: Stand Up for Southport Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened In February 2025, Merseyside Police announced that more than 1,000 officers and staff had completed trauma-informed training. Who Did This? The region of Merseyside county in the UK is predominantly liberal. It is governed by a seven-member council, all of whom are members of the leftist Labour Party. Emily Spurrell, the Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner, mandated the training. She was elected to the position in 2021. She is a member of the Labour party and the Co-operative Party which holds some principles of socialism. Spurrell was briefly infamous in 2022 for calling her police force ‘institutionally racist.’ It is believed that Spurrell was the first police commissioner in the UK to suggest their own force is institutionally racist. The training was provided by Violence Reduction Partnership, a non-profit org that uses a public health approach based on the trauma-informed and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) doctrines. The Premise The alleged rationale for the training is that encounters with insensitive police—whether as victims or as perpetrators of crime—can “often exacerbate their existing experiences of trauma” [1]. The main intended outcome of the training is that vulnerable, marginalized groups will trust the police more. The training content covered an overview of trauma and ACEs, their ability to cause offending behaviors and worsen health, and principles of how to perform trauma-informed policing. The training also included a therapy-style reflective practice session for group discussion. The training will eventually be given to all 5,700 officers and staff. Analysis The training content went far beyond teaching about how true psychological trauma impacts humans. They taught attachment theory—the inborn compulsion for infants to bond with caregivers—which has nothing to do with trauma. They taught false concepts that historical events can have trauma impacts through generations into the present day and that racism is a form of trauma. Trauma-informed trainings have been conducted in hundreds of settings over the past decade even though there is no evidence that these programs achieve their intended outcomes (see here and here and here). The only outcomes measured have been perceptions of participants about whether they learned new knowledge. No studies have attempted to measure outcomes about psychological harm, behavior change, or crime reduction. If there were evidence for these trainings, it is not clear what it would look like. Perpetrators are handled with sensitivity to childhood traumas? Perpetrators feel less threatened by police? Victims feel more emotionally coddled by police? To what end? Does a particular empathic language or calm voice make them any less violent or less victimized? These possible outcomes have been neither well-justified nor tested. Why Is This Happening?
They recast their violent rhetoric with a therapeutic language of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda based on identity, emotion, oppression, and trauma [3]. Attacking the police was always a central tenet of this movement. Instead of ‘kill the pigs’ violence of the 1960s, it morphed into ‘defund the police’ chants during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Activists believed they could abolish the police and replace their role of keeping the peace with trauma-informed, gender-affirming, and anti-racist policies. After the riots, communities that defunded police and adopted leniency toward criminals saw how quickly violence erupted at a record-setting pace. As the riots again failed to achieve the revolution, it settled into a more systematic long march of trauma-informed trainings through the institutions. Hence, the scaled-back effort is to keep police but turn them into re-educated therapists through trauma-informed ideology trainings. References [1] Wilson C, Butler N, Farrugia AM, Quigg Z (2023 April). Merseyside police trauma-informed training: Impact on trauma-informed knowledge and attitudes. Public Health Institute, Liverpool John Moores University. https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/-/media/phi-reports/pdf/2023-06-merseyside-police-trauma-informed-training-evaluation.pdf [2] Harris, M. and Fallot, R.D. (2001), Envisioning a trauma-informed service system: A vital paradigm shift. New Directions for Mental Health Services, 2001: 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.23320018903 [3] Rufo C (2023). America’s Cultural Revolution. How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Broadside Books: New York Comments are closed.
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