A History of Police Psychology

In The Beginning

While police officer selection was psychology’s first contribution to modern law enforcement, helping to maintain effective functioning of police professionals through clinical intervention, training, research, and organizational consulting emerged as other aspects of police and public safety psychology. These milieu-adapted practices of the specialty of police psychology have recent origins. In the early twentieth century, only a small number of mental health professionals were involved within the broader criminal justice system. These professionals engaged in activities such as criminal profiling, eyewitness memory and identification, hypnosis, and early attempts at selection to measure the aptitudes necessary to become a police officer, to name a few.