Mind-Body Awareness Training (MBAT)
A national model for police training refinement and cultural transformation…
Dr. Panebianco is applying his 30 year clinical history to transform police training on a national scale through MBAT: Mind-Body Awareness Training. The incidence of civilian deaths along with the incidence of chronic police stress and suicide, continues at unacceptable levels within the US criminal justice system. In fact, the US criminal justice system arguably does not effectively employ training and maintenance programs to address the multidimensional causal variables of on the job police stress and at times, overreach that can lead to undesirable and tragic outcomes for community members.
Having had family members and close friends who have spent their careers in the criminal justice system, Dr. Panebianco is well aware of the chronic stress of a criminal justice system career that can adversely impact the lives of police officers and their loved ones pre and post retirement, and no less importantly, the lives of the people they are employed to serve. Like police officers and first responders, Dr. Panebianco is also personally aware of the stress of life and death decisions through his training in trauma surgery.
Per Dr. Panebianco, “when any of us operates from a heightened sympathetic fight or flight nervous system tone, we are less capable of internal control to make the best decisions in a given moment and we therefore have the capacity to make challenging situations much worse leading to over-reach, reactivity, escalation, and undesirable outcomes. An over activated sympathetic nervous system can also lead to faulty perceptions and projections, the distortion of reality, and faulty risk assessment of a given situation.”
How does Dr. Panebianco’s 30 year clinical career offer an effective solution to the ongoing national crises in the criminal justice system?:
Dr. Panebianco has advanced training and extensive clinical experience in the field of Mind-Body Medicine and Integrative Medicine. Mind-Body Medicine is a revolutionary twenty-first century approach to healthcare that includes a wide range of behavioral, mind-body, and body-mind nervous systems auto-regulation skills that connect to the uniqueness of the individual while also synergizing with conventional medical interventions and traditional healing systems. Mind-Body Medicine’s robust scientific underpinnings have benefited from the advancements of neuroscience, neuroimaging, and such fields as psychoneuroimmunology, that reveal the interconnectedness between one’s thoughts and emotions on health and perception in various ways.
Dr. Panebianco is also the author of The Science and Practice of Mind-Body Medicine for the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, a previous Integrative Medicine fellow of Dr. Andrew Weil of the University of Arizona, and prior member of the Mental Health Innovative Task Force for the federal government. In the last 10 years of his clinical career, Dr. Panebianco established the first and only official Mind-Body Medicine Clinic (MBMC) for the federal government for our nation’s veterans and served as Medical Director of the VA’s MBMC for 10 years. In 2017, that very same clinic was awarded an Outstanding Wellness Care award for the city of Tucson through Inside Tucson Business and Tucson Local Media.
Patients who completed the 10 week Mind-Body Skills Group through the VA’s Mind-Body Medicine Clinic designed by Dr. Panebianco, also gave testimony regarding their positive experiences to a government commission. One veteran also traveled to Washington to share his transformative experience employing autonomic nervous system regulation skills with government leaders, and letters of appreciation of impact have been received from local congresswomen and an Arizona senator.
Veterans experienced numerous health benefits through specific skills of autonomic nervous system regulation related to issues of reactivity, stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, chronic pain, alcoholism, and substance use/abuse along with a host of other physical and mental health challenges. Many veterans also applied the various learned skills effectively in their daily lives to expand the scope and experience of their lives through enhanced awareness and decreased reactivity, while enjoying the capacity to have a different relationship with their thoughts, emotions, memories, and traumas so such elements had less control over them.
Police officers and other first responders, like veterans and active military, are integral members of our communities with families of their own, and their service stressors should not adversely impact the quality of their personal lives when they are off duty or pursuing retirement. Beyond counseling and peer support, mind-body skills are an extremely effective means to short-circuit negative feedback loops that can re-immerse one in a prior stressful or traumatic experience or take one away from being present in civilian moments and moments with family and friends in favorable ways.
During his work with veterans and other patients including many police officers over the years, Dr. Panebianco has experienced great success implementing nervous system auto-regulation skills which gives the user an experience of internal control given the realty of limitations of external variable control in many circumstances.
Mind-Body Awareness Training (MBAT) can enhance the capacity of trained personnel for more accurate risk assessment of a given circumstance. Further, MBAT can improve the capacity to access internal and external resources for a given challenge as opposed to approaching a given challenge from a reactive standpoint that can lead to overreach. No less importantly, if a first responder is operating from a fight or flight response, there is a greater likelihood of a disproportionate response to a given threat level. The good news is police officers can learn mind-body skills that they can deploy in the field that can lead to effective responses to more skillfully draw from training and more appropriately apply such skills to the uniqueness of a given situation. As above, such skills can also minimize and even eliminate the adverse impact of service on one’s personal life.
What are some specifics of the ongoing national crises within the criminal justice system?
According to Jake Horton’s May 2021 article How US Police Training Compares with the Rest of the World, the following applies:
More people are killed by police in the United States than in any other developed nation.
The majority of the world’s police forces carry firearms, but no developed nation uses them against their citizens as often as officers in the United States and disproportionately against African-Americans.
In 2020, as a gun culture, fewer than 10% of people killed by police were recorded as unarmed.
Per Rashawn Ray, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland: “In most states people can carry guns either on their body or in their vehicles so this escalate things for police– they instantly perceive that anyone can be a threat.”
In 2020, 49 police officers were shot dead while on duty and (yet) some argue the use of (police) force is disproportionate to the threat, with better training needed to de-escalate situations.
There are around 18,000 police agencies in the United States but with no national standards on training, and procedures and timescales vary across the country.
On average, US officers spend around 21 weeks training before they are qualified to go on patrol, which is far less than in most other developed countries according to a report by the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform (ICJTR). In developed countries, the United States had among the lowest in terms of average hours required.
US police academies spend far more time on firearms training than on de-escalating a situation, 71 hours against 21, on average, according to a 2013 US Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
In other countries such as Norway and Finland, there are more rigorous rules as to what is considered justified use of force. Finland has one of the highest gun-ownership rates in Europe but incidents of police shooting civilians are extremely rare.
Per professor Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice: “Most of the training in the United States is focused on various types of use of force, primarily the various types of physical force. The communication skills are largely ignored by most police academies. This is why you see officers very rapidly escalating from initial communication to the actual physical use of force because this is how they train.”
The (ICJTR) executive director Randy Shrewsberry says more emphasis also needs to be put on mental health training both for when officers are responding to suspects and for officers themselves. “Police officers are up to five times more likely to kill themselves than to be killed by homicide. We'd like to see a greater emphasis on police officer mental-health training. Currently they only get a few hours of training if any on self-care.”
According to the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform (ICJTR), the country’s only not profit advocacy group dedicated to reforming training methods in our criminal justice system, the following applies:
Current police training is a core cause of unjust killings, mass incarcerations, lack of accountability, and poor relationships with many communities.
Some states allow an officer to work before he or she begins training.
There are 37 states that will allow untrained officers to have full authority to detain, arrest, incarcerate, and even kill without ever attending basic police training.
There are special categories of law enforcement officers who often receive considerably less mandated training and yet can still exercise full police powers such as Special Jurisdiction Police, who are volunteers for law-enforcement.
There are no federally mandated training minimums which can range from about nine months of basic training in Connecticut to no required training in Hawaii.
The United States has among the lowest police training requirements by far internationally.
On average police spend nearly 1/3 of their training on combat tactics. Many law enforcement training curricula focus on preparing for the potential of a threat, and without reform including addressing underlying biases and attitudes and opinions, we all remain complicit in a falsely heightened adversarial perception of threat. Police officers are being trained to react when a threat is merely possible instead of probable.
At least 25% of all people killed by law enforcement officers exhibited signs of mental illness. In one year alone that is more than 275 people. And yet officers on average spend only 10 hours training for mental health crisis intervention.
Law enforcement continues to have minimal training related to diversity, culture, and bias. Many states have no bias training mandates at all.
An overwhelmingly disproportionate emphasis exists on tactical skills such as those dealing with firearms and self-defense and by contrast, the least amount of training is provided on the greatest threat to an officer’s mortality being suicide. Each year, police officer suicides exceed the number of police officers killed by 2 to 3 times according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigations.
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, the hours of preventative training for self-care is far below the hours dedicated for self-defense.
The ICJTR is seeking basic training solutions to the epidemic of mental health issues among law enforcement that includes suicide, substance abuse, violence, and criminality.
The Next Step for Transforming Police Reform:
Dr. Panebianco is currently working with various stakeholders regarding the need for national police refinement including those within the criminal justice system, and others with appropriate skills and awareness, to apply his expertise in Mind-Body Medicine and autonomic nervous system auto-regulation skills to cultivate a national model for police training refinement through mind-body skills acquisition and awareness training entitled MBAT NOT Combat.
Clearly a multidimensional approach to police refinement is needed that integrates all the operative variables from all pertinent perspectives including appropriate cultural/bias/diversity awareness, awareness of the mindset of “otherness” that can lead to undesirable self-fulfilling outcomes, and an approach that integrates an auto-regulation skillset to offset the intrinsic stress of police work to enhance appropriate responses to challenging circumstances.
Such a multidimensional approach will be potentiated when the work of such organizations as Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE) is also a valued component to the solution. ABLE emerged from Dr. Panebianco’s alma mater Georgetown University who partnered their Georgetown Innovative Policing Program with global law firm Sheppard Mullin. ABLE aspires to prepare officers to successfully intervene to prevent harm and to create a law enforcement culture that supports peer intervention as well as to promote officer health and wellness.
No doubt, rooting out behavioral patterns that can emerge from an overactive sympathetic nervous system that otherwise can escalate and exacerbate already challenging situations is critical. When officers have the capacity when needed, to de-escalate internally, they are in a much more effective mind-body state to step back and effectively de-escalate external scenarios. Integrating an effective “in the moment” skillset of nervous system auto-regulation that enables front-line officers to appropriately and effectively respond vs. react to moments of challenge is vital,…literally vital.
