Save Our Streets

ReachStrong seeks federal funding via a Community Project Request (CPR) for ReachStrong’s revolutionary Save Our Streets, or SOS Protocol. Funding will be used to develop and deploy a clinical virtual reality protocol for police, law enforcement, and first responders who are subject to high incidence of Post Traumatic Stress.

Especially as the country deals with racial justice reforms in our law enforcement capabilities, providing meaningful tools to police departments to remediate the very real mental and emotional health effects of their service is an important step toward better community policing outcomes.

There is a growing recognition that one of the occupational hazards in the first responder professions (Police, Firefighters, and Emergency Medical Technicians), involves the long-term, chronic exposure to stress/trauma and its subsequent, negative impact on critical decision-making, mental health, and well-being. Most relevant PTSD symptoms in the policing context include emotional numbing and hyper-arousal. Those symptoms alone provide a toxic combination that could influence whether someone impulsively pulls a trigger or not in a highly charged situation.

ReachStrong, through our sister organization SoldierStrong, has addressed serious PTSD among veterans by providing clinicians with revolutionary virtual reality therapy protocols.

The BraveMind VR Protocol is a clinical, interactive, virtual reality based exposure therapy tool that is being used to assess and treat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It allows clinicians to gradually immerse patients into virtual environments representative of their traumatic experiences in a controlled, stepwise fashion by providing the capability to control multi-sensory emotional stimuli and monitor the intensity of the patients’ stress responses via advanced brain imaging and psychophysiological assessment techniques. This approach for helping patients to gradually confront and reprocess difficult emotional memory is based on the evidence-based method for PTSD treatment referred to as Prolonged Exposure.

ReachStrong and SoldierStrong are providing the BraveMind VR Protocol to VA Medical Centers around the country, working in collaboration with the VA’s Innovator’s Network to identify the most appropriate clinical locations and settings for this technology.

A large body of scientific evidence and clinical experience shows this protocol to be effective for reducing PTSD symptoms in a clinically meaningful fashion and is especially effective with patient who have co-morbid depression. The methodology also reduces the stigma associated with seeking treatment, making it more likely that those who need it most will seek treatment rather than hiding symptoms. One study indicated a 77% preference rate for the VR approach when patients were asked what treatment they would prefer to seek.

ReachStrong seeks funding to tailor and expand the software to policing and first responder scenarios, begin providing the hardware, software, and clinical access to law enforcement agencies, and add software capability that will integrate PTSD identification and remediation into implicit bias and de-escalation training to supplement and enhance other existing police training tools and techniques.

The Community Project Request total cost to deliver these capabilities is $10 million.

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