Ageing in Policing: Generating a conceptual framework for understanding wellbeing, organisational support, and operational sustainability.

The global trend of an ageing workforce presents complex challenges and opportunities for policing. Despite extensive scholarship on occupational stress and early-career officer wellbeing, the experiences of ageing officers remain underexplored. This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding ageing in policing, grounded in qualitative research conducted with 36 officers aged 50 and above within the New South Wales Police Force (NSWPF), Australia. Findings reveal the interplay of individual ageing processes (physical decline, cumulative trauma, psychological strain, but also enhanced communication and mentoring skills), occupational demands (high-risk environments, shift work, and cumulative exposure to trauma), and organisational support structures (policy, wellness initiatives, mentoring programs, and retirement planning). The proposed framework highlights how outcomes, officer wellbeing, job performance, workforce retention, and retention of institutional knowledge, are shaped by the effectiveness of organisational responses in mediating the relationship between ageing and occupational stress. By integrating insights from gerontology, occupational stress theory, and organisational support theory, this framework advances conceptual and practical understanding of ageing in policing. It offers an evidence-based tool for developing policy, guiding workforce planning, and sustaining policing capacity. In doing so, the framework emphasises how ageing in policing intersects with vulnerability, trauma, and mental health impacts arising from cumulative exposure to high-stress and abusive environments, thereby directly addressing the journal’s concern with abuse and its consequences. The paper concludes by considering how the framework informs practice and research across policing and other high-stress professions.