Marina Carbonell
From 2007 to 2018, I served as a police officer with a provincial police service in Canada. Starting on patrol, I also worked in communications, criminal investigation division, and forensics, I gained experience providing front-line response in a wide variety of emergency contexts. Prior to becoming a police officer, I spent my youth playing sports, specifically hockey and rugby, which resulted over the years in numerous sports-related injuries, including having my nose broken three times.
Figure 1: Graduation Day, 2007
Unbeknownst to me, my broken nose led to a deviated septum – a condition where the middle portion of the nose was twisted, obstructing airflow and preventing proper drainage. I knew my breathing was laboured; a girl in my police recruit class commented on how loud my breathing was, and I couldn’t run with an ‘in through the nose, out through the mouth’ pattern. Finally, in the Winter of 2017, I saw an ear-nose-and-throat (ENT) doctor. I learned that the obstruction in my nose had created growths within my sinus cavities called polyps. My nose needed to be reconstructed, and the polyps had to be removed. The surgery went well; however, I could not have anticipated the results. On the outside, my nose looked the same. On the inside, however, I quickly realized how poor my sense of smell had been once it had been fully restored.
Working in Forensics is unlike any other job. Calls range from minor incidents involving photographs of property damage and forensics processing of stolen vehicles, to crime scene management and analysis of complicated homicide scenes. In my province, there is no coroner; every death at home is attended by patrol and forensics to rule out foul play.
Figure 2: Caught by the media while photographing a scene, 2017
The first few weeks after the surgery were tricky. As my nose was healing on the inside, it would occasionally bleed if I got up too fast or bent over. Normally, this wouldn’t be cause for concern; however, working in forensics brought the potential of introducing contamination into a crime scene. The last thing anyone wants to do is affect the integrity of a scene or necessitate questions about why your DNA is everywhere! This is commonly discussed in forensics; German police discovered scene contamination introduced by a cotton swab factory worker in Austria after the worker’s DNA was located at multiple scenes (Himmelreich, 2009).
After my nose healed, I quickly became aware of my heightened sense of smell. Before this point, I genuinely thought some people just experienced crime scenes and death differently than others in terms of fortitude, determination or tenacity. To say I was shocked is an understatement. Walking into a heavy smoker’s home, standing next to people with strong odours (good and not so good), and even the smells of diverse cuisines were astonishing compared to the previous complete absence. The difference was jarring; I could smell the iron in blood, and the chemicals I used for processing, where there had been nothing before. Autopsies were a completely different experience, as was the newfound sensory overload of crime scenes. I was astonished by the difference, finding a huge disparity in my personal perception of my work as a result of regaining my sense of smell. The increased ability to smell made it challenging to leave work behind; my hands continued to smell like nitrile gloves, my skin seemed to exude the cleaning chemicals I used before leaving work, and unfavourable experiences lingered in my hair and on my clothes with apathetic vestige, making it harder to wash off the day. Smell, as a sense, is important, but it can also have lasting effects on well-being. Examining smell, Hur and colleagues found a strong correlation between smell and depression, with the prevalence of depression in individuals reporting negative or challenging smell experiences at nearly 40% (Hur et al., 2018). Taste and smell problems can be the result of trauma to the head (Schechter & Henkin, 1974). Sense of smell can be influenced by fractures to the face (Drareni et al., 2021) and may be altered by diet (Liu et al, 2020; Stevenson et al., 2020), and salt intake (Henkin, 2014). Vestibular sensory systems may be negatively affected by sleep disruptions, impacting vision and balance (Besnard et al., 2018). Thus, police may be further at risk of sensory changes compared to others, as the profession involves physical altercations, shift work disrupting sleep, and often poor eating habits. These findings are especially timely, given the reported impacts on olfactory experiences by people recovering from COVID-19 (Coelho, 2022).
Souhami (2023) argues that police are affected by their sensory experiences, such as working in the dark, which influences how they work. I agree with Souhami that my perceptions in policing were altered in the dark, and I was aware of this influence. For my entire tenure as a police officer, I refused to watch horror movies for fear it would influence my ability to do my job – you can’t be afraid of fictitious movie characters when you’re running through the woods at night. Police work in an environment where perception is everything. The interpretation of threats helps us determine action, but our interpretation of the world around us is subjective. Fear is an adaptive mechanism intended to keep us safe (Gagnon et al., 2013); however, when afraid, we perceive situations as having more risk (Stefanucci & Proffitt, 2009). For police officers and other first responders, training emphasizes vigilance and safety. The work is stressful and is physically and mentally injurious (Pooley & Turns, 2021). The “anti-police rhetoric” is common (Pooley & Turns, 2021), with perceptions of vulnerability leading to increased hypervigilance as a means to maintain feelings of safety (Pooley & Turns, 2021). Hypervigilance can also be heightened as a symptom of posttraumatic stress, a further consequence of the work, with police experiencing higher rates of PTSD than the public (Carleton et al., 2018).
Souhami (2023) also describes police visual perceptions of their environment as imbued with feeling, calling for increased scholarship into sensile influences. In response, I would argue that there is significance beyond sight in our sensory experiences. It is not solely the vulnerability in the dark or our visual experiences that lead to a change in our perceptions, but the combination of our olfactory, vestibular, proprioceptor, auditory, tactile and oral sensations, known and unknown.
The dark itself is known; we are generally aware of our reduced perception and increased risk. The feeling of vulnerability tells us to pay attention, to be aware, to stay safe. I always preferred night shift, as a ‘night owl’ myself. Working at night felt less restricted with less traffic slowing down around me, fewer calls for service, and fewer car accidents to attend. In the summer months, the cool air was a reprieve from enduring body armour in the hot sun. Weekends were always busy, but weeknights sometimes permitted time to catch up on paperwork, actually eat a lunch on shift, and carried the hope of fewer files for follow during the following week.
Familiarity, however, makes a difference. During one call for service in my early patrol days, I responded to a domestic disturbance call in an area outside my regular district. It was dark, and I was in a part of town that I was unfamiliar with, dispatched there because the unit in the area was assigned to another matter on the busy summer Friday night. The newness of the area increased my attention and intensified my focus. The dark felt darker, and the air hinted at a crispness that should have been absent on a warm summer night. I remember the walk up the long driveway, the gravel crunching under my work boots, while I was trying to figure out which door I should knock at. Before I could knock at the door, a huge German Shepherd appeared on my flank out of nowhere, running forcefully at me, with explosive and thunderous barking. The dog ended up being friendly, but the fear induced by my lack of visual acuity, the sudden sound and intensity of the dog barking, and the abrupt disruption to my vestibular senses and proprioception system during the swift turn was disorienting in an unusual way. I was looking for risk as I was approaching the house, I felt aware, though that sense of awareness was spurious, and the subsequent shock was galvanizing.
The sensory input of the unknown is invisible and profound. We ignore our sense of smell until we have a head cold and lose taste. In policing, smell itself acts like a warning system; approaching a door, I would get a sense of what to expect. During one call for service where a lady had passed away at home, the patrol officer tried to warn my colleague and I, both in forensics, about the scene inside. We immediately dismissed his comments, thinking patrol officers were always dramatic about death scenes. Entering the front door was like walking into a brick wall. The dozens of cats inside had saturated the air with heavy ammonia, and I felt like I could see the air waving, heavy with dolor. We knew we had to go upstairs, but each step was forced and burdensome like walking through water. The creak of each stair was deafening, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh of our Tyvek protective suits redounding between our ears. The cats wanted attention, moving in and out between our legs, limiting the space on the cramped stairs. We got halfway up to the second floor when my colleague stopped solid. “We have to get out,” she said with veiled panic. I could feel the sweat coming down my forehead, and I could see it in her hair, too. I remember telling her that if we left, we would have to come back in, we were already halfway there. The following ten or fifteen seconds of eye contact between us felt like it lasted an hour. We would have to come back in.
Prior to surgery, I attributed my ability to withstand the challenges of policing to a personal aptitude or individual competency. Being able to experience the change in perception, while challenging, allowed me insight into how fundamental sensory experience is to functional ability, focus, capability, and coping. Schleiermacher, concerned with language, wrote, “every utterance corresponds to a sequence of thoughts of the utterer, and must therefore be able to be completely understood via the nature of the utterer, his mood, his aim” (Schleiermacher, 1998, p. 229). I would argue this conceptualization of language can be extended to our sensory experience; our perceptions are rooted in our context and standpoint in the moment and over time, which in turn, influences our experience and contextualizes our disposition and abilities. If, as voiced by Wittgenstein, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (1922, p.201), our ability to understand and explain our experiences is vital to processing and conceptual expansion, and potentially, could have long reaching impacts for mental health, job satisfaction, and wellness. For example, understanding sensory needs holistically could influence perceptions and our choices. Something as simple as chewing gum can reduce stress during stimulus experiences (Yu et al, 2013), decrease the levels of cortisol in saliva (Tahara et al, 2007), and increase perception of performance and wellbeing (Smith et al., 2012). Gum chewing may also improve memory (Hirano et al., 2008) and positively influence attention (Hirano et al., 2013). For police, the influences on the visual, olfactory, tactile, vestibular, proprioceptor, gustatory, and auditory systems are complex and variable, and knowingly and unknowingly affect vulnerability and perceptions due to the conditions and environment in which police work. I agree with Souhami, we should not be afraid of the dark. But we must consider how the combination of perception, vulnerability, and all sensory aspects influence us in immeasurable, substantial ways. We still have to do the job, knowing the dog may not be friendly next time, knowing we will have to come back in.
Sensory Criminology 