Injuries in Specialist Police Officers: A Scoping Review

Within Law Enforcement Organizations, specialist police officers perform dangerous tasks beyond those of general duties police officers. These tasks are often performed in complex austere environments while officers wear or carry heavy loads and place officers at a high risk of injury. The aims of this scoping review were to identify, collect, and synthesize the available evidence on injuries sustained by specialist police, and to compare these injuries with those of other law enforcement officers and wider Special Forces populations.

Four academic databases were searched using key search terms. Duplicates of identified records were removed, with those remaining screened against eligibility criteria. A rearward and forward snowballing approach of citations was used to identify other relevant records. Key findings were then summarized in table format.

From an initial 3,266 identified records, 2 studies (1 cross-sectional, 1 retrospective cohort) met the eligibility criteria. The most common injury sites varied between the studies and only one study reported injury incidence, that being 1,347 per 1,000 person-years.

Musculoskeletal injuries occur frequently in the specialist police population and may bear some similarities to those among general duties police officers and Military Special Forces. However, there is a limited amount of evidence elucidating the injury profile of this population.