February 6 Luncheon

This luncheon will be at Maggiano's!!

Speaker: Dr. Maren Jones

In her role as a psychologist at HPD, Dr. Jones focuses on helping police officers and civilian police staff to be in a calm, focused, fully present state of mind when they are on the job. To that end, she teaches classes at the Houston Police Academy on topics such as stress management, responding to trauma, wellness, police suicide, and managing unconscious bias. She also consults with work groups within the agency to address workplace stress and to provide post-crisis support. When officer-involved shootings take place, Dr. Jones often goes to the scene to talk with the officers and later provides post-critical incident counseling.  Dr. Jones is also involved in the selection of police cadets, completing psychological evaluations of other-wise qualified applicants. The bulk of her professional time, however, is spent providing individual and couples therapy to HPD officers and civilian employees, as well as to their children, teens, and young adult children up to age 26. The goal is to help resolve potentially distracting issues and improve mood and functioning for HPD employees so that they can function optimally at work. She feels privileged to have been in this fascinating and rewarding role for 16 years.

After earning her B.A. in Psychology at Yale, her M.A. and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at UCLA, Dr. Jones completed a Post-doctoral Fellowship at Depelchin Children’s Center. Dr. Jones has worked previously as the Director of Student Support at River Baptist School, and in Private Practice.  In addition to her full-time job at HPD, Dr. Jones also currently maintains a private practice, providing psychotherapy and evaluations via telehealth.  She has two young adult sons, one is a new resident physician in Dallas and the other is a manager in the business advisory practice of a large accounting firm in New York City. She also has a rescue dog who is a very sweet.

In her talk “Understanding Police Today,” Dr. Jones will speak to the group about the efforts to make the police force more professional and accountable, but also the toll that policing takes on police officers, especially in relationship to critical incidents such as shootings and responding gruesome scenes, and in dealing with public sentiment toward officers.

Dr. Jones can be reached at drmarenjones@gmail.com.