The Thin Blue Line: Perspectives From Military Veteran Police Officers on Camaraderie and Cooperation

By comparing their experiences in both occupational cultures, US military veterans who also served as civilian police are positioned to provide insight into the causal mechanisms of intense social bonds like psychological kinship—when individuals conceive of their (non-biologically related) in-group members as “family” (Bailey, 1988). Two prominent explanations for this kind of intense group bonding are either through the sharing of “suitably” dysphoric (i.e., traumatic) experiences causing group member’s individual identity and group identity to “fuse,” becoming interwoven and porous leading to psychological kinship—a concept called identity fusion (Reese & Whitehouse, 2021; Whitehouse, 2018); or a mapping of primary group status onto fellow soldiers, sergeants, and officers through prolonged and intimate physical and psychological proximity, a foundational concept called spatial proximity (Shils & Janowitz, 1948). These theoretical frameworks have been explored exclusively independent of each other. This study uses a novel approach by intentionally combining and applying a unified model: identity fusion + spatial proximity = psychological kinship, to explore whether the explanatory power of these concepts is increased when conjoined. In this exploratory, comparative study, qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 military veterans of the US armed forces who also served as civilian police officers to contrast their social experiences in the military with their social experiences serving as police officers. Participant interviews support that the theoretical models have more explanatory power together than separately.