“Psychometric Testing? Fix the Mental-Health Crisis First, Police Officers Warn”

More than 14,000 officers were signed off last year with mental-health issues — yet the Federation wants psychometric tests.

The call from the Police Federation of England and Wales for mandatory psychological and psychometric testing for new recruits has reignited a debate that runs far deeper than entry standards. National Secretary John Partington argues that policing “isn’t for everyone” and that resilience, empathy and moral strength must be proven from the outset. On paper, it is a compelling sentiment. In practice, however, it risks becoming another example of policy devised in isolation from the brutal realities of frontline policing and the toll the job already exacts on those who serve.

Partington warns that the pressure to fill gaps left by record numbers of departing officers risks lowering entry standards, insisting that psychometric testing must become a national requirement “if we are serious about rebuilding trust.” Yet this argument sits uneasily against the backdrop of an unprecedented mental-health crisis inside policing itself. Last year alone, 14,508 police officers across England and Wales were signed off due to anxiety, depression, stress or PTSD. In the Metropolitan Police, over 2,000 officers were off sick for mental-health reasons. These are not numbers that point to a workforce in need of harsher filters; they are numbers that indicate a workforce drowning without adequate support.

It is those in the emergency services who truly understand what sustained trauma looks like. Police officers, paramedics and firefighters do the jobs no one else wants to do. They attend the scenes that society pretends it does not produce. They literally pick up the pieces of what remains after the most horrendous moments imaginable. While most people might encounter several traumatic events in a lifetime, emergency-service workers can face several before lunchtime. There is rarely time to process anything. They go from one call to the next, carrying what they saw on the last job into the next doorstep they cross. In that context, how can psychometric testing provide a meaningful measure of who is “fit” for the job? And critically, what does the Federation mean by “who we keep in”?

The question exposes a glaring omission in the debate. No one appears to have considered addressing the sheer scale of mental-health damage officers are already experiencing. Those who work directly with traumatised officers — people like Gary Hayes of PTSD 999, Lobby and Vicky from Trojan Wellbeing, and peer support worker Toni — are the ones witnessing the real consequences. They see the tears, the panic, the hypervigilance, the exhaustion, the sleeplessness. They see the human cost that official reports never capture.

“I’ll listen to the Fed the day they stop gaslighting its members and start convincing officers they actually care. There is absolutely a new cohort of recruits who genuinely do not understand the demands of the job, either through naivety or ignorance, but the job is doing nothing to protect them once in, even when they are in the thick of it early on, because there aren’t enough officers to shelter them whilst training,” said Toni.

Gary, who recently delivered a PTSD awareness session to a group of officers, described being met with tears, hugs and uncontrollable sobbing from those who finally recognised themselves in what he described. “How do we measure resilience from that, according to the PFEW? It’s completely misguided and wrong,” he said.

Mental health remains the elephant in the room — and no one in authority is addressing it. Officer suicides are rising, and the support available to those suffering is negligible. Too often, suicides are viewed through the distorted lens of misconduct data, allowing people who know nothing of the reality to point fingers and cast judgement. The ignorant speak, and they make the most noise. The trauma remains long after the uniform is hung up, and for many it remains for a lifetime. Policing is not a job you leave at the station door. It is a vocation that embeds itself into the psyche, for better and very often for worse.

Before policing introduces yet another layer of testing for those desperate to serve, it must confront the far more urgent issue: the broken system that is failing the officers who are already inside it.

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