Thread by @JamesThrot

Has police & military behaviour become harsher, more rigid & more escalation-prone since 2020?

This isn’t just about politics or “bad apples”.

There’s a deeper, biological factor being ignored…

SARS-CoV-2

I’m a neurologist, and I’ll explain what’s going on here 🧵.

It’s common knowledge that both policing and the military already over select for people with certain traits:

- high threat sensitivity
- comfort with hierarchy
- rule based cognition
- obedience over ambiguity
- identity anchored in authority

This was true long before COVID.

What historically prevented this from becoming outright dangerous at scale was intact frontal lobe function.

The frontal cortex supplies inhibition, proportionality, empathy under stress, moral updating & the ability to back down.

And COVID is proven to damage the frontal lobes

It is crucial to state that the frontal lobes don’t make someone “good”, per se.

They act as brakes, especially on people already drawn to coercive authority.

Hence the frontal lobes don’t make someone good, but they do stop them being dangerous.

Since 2020, we’ve introduced a population-level stressor that disproportionately affects frontal function; repeated SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Leading to neuroinflammation, sleep disruption, cognitive fatigue & executive dysfunction.

None of this requires dramatic illness to matter.

When frontal regulation weakens, people assume that IQ or technical skill degrades first.

But instead, the first things to go are inhibition, flexibility, perspective-taking, empathy under load, and metacognition (“am I misreading this?”).

The problem we have here is that the following does not degrade at the same rate; habit, reflex, rule enforcement, threat response (not recognition) & in-group loyalty.

In fact, these often strengthen as frontal regulation weakens.

And it is this asymmetry that is the problem.

As a result, you end up with officers & soldiers who feel subjectively fine, but who now:

- escalate faster
- tolerate ambiguity poorly
- default to literalism
- struggle to de-escalate
- double down instead of reassessing

This is a classic frontal-impairment profile.

In ordinary civilians, this shows up as irritability, withdrawal & bluntness.

In armed authority roles, the same impairment produces disproportionate harm because discretion & force remain intact.

And some individuals in these institutions were already predisposed to cruelty.

This is why institutional fixes ultimately fail.

Body cams, new training modules, revised policies all assume stable cognition and inhibition.

Those assumptions no longer reliably hold.

It also explains why the “good eggs” within these institutions can’t/don’t solve it.

As cognitive load rises and inhibition weakens, reflective people burn out, leave, or conform.

While rigid, dominance-oriented types persist and rise.

It’s important to remember that none of this requires malice.

It requires only a combination of the following:

- degraded executive control
- high stress environments
- legitimised violence
- weak accountability
- authority insulated from feedback

Ignoring brain function doesn’t make these roles safer. It makes them more brittle.

You cannot compensate for reduced inhibition & empathy with stricter standard operating procedures, discipline or surveillance.

These become ineffective, and that is deeply concerning.

Frontal lobe dysfunction has been studied for decades in neurology, psychiatry, and dementia research.

The effects are predictable, well-documented, and directly align with the patterns we’re now seeing in policing/military behaviour.

When executive control weakens:

authority + power + pre-existing temperament = higher risk of coercive or harmful behaviour

This is science, not opinion.

The alignment with current post-2020 behavioural shifts is exactly what neurology predicts.

The fact of the matter is that post-2020 COVID induced neurocognitive decline doesn’t create abusive policing or militarism.

But it removes the neurological safeguards that once constrained them, particularly in people already attracted to coercive power.

This is why it’s now all too common to see videos of British Police using excessive force against peaceful protestors, or German Police being overly aggressive against their own citizens, or US Police being disproportionate in their responses.

Coincidence? Perhaps.

END