Affects of Job Related Stress in Police Officers

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When it comes to police officers, people often think about times they’ve been pulled over or the television show ‘COPS’. Just like anything else, a person’s perception of police officers and their work depends on previous interactions with them and what they have seen in the media. What is often overlooked by the general public, are the stressors that police officers face in their field of work and how such stress can affect their personal lives. There are several cases in which researchers studied the cause and effect of work related stress and what effects there are on people in law enforcement.
In a study by Can, Hendy & Imbody (2013), research was done to enhance the understanding of aggression by police officers in close relationships. The researchers compared ‘models’ of aggression for police officers based on Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977). Bandura’s research focused on observational learning or modeling, which is learning that occurs through the observation of others (Santrock, 2014). They found that police officers often exhibit characteristics of aggression in regards to conflict-resolution, which had seen from their fathers and/or supervisors. These findings account for 35.5 percent of the incidence in romantic partner aggression and 59.1 percent of the incidence in police partner aggression (Can, Hendy & Imbody, 2013). Every police department should do mandatory conflict-resolution workshops for work and home, to develop non-aggressive means of conflict resolution as suggested by the researchers (Can, Hendy & Imbody, 2013).
There are a few reasons as to why this research could be misleading. Firstly, this study was limited to Caucasian police officers from Pennsylvania. This does not allow...

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...-62. doi: 10.1027/1016-9040.14.1.51
McCreary, D. R., & Thompson, M. M. (2006). Development of two reliable and valid measures of stressors in policing: The operational and organizational police stress questionnaires. International Journal of Stress Management, 13(4), 494-518. doi: 10.1037/1072-5245.13.4.494
Santrock, J. W. (2014). Adolescence. (15 ed., p. 32). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Symonds, M. (1970). Emotional hazards of police work. The American Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 30(2), 155-160. doi: 10.1007/BF01874038 van der Velden, P. G., Kleber, R. J., Grievink, L., & Yzermans, J. C. (2010). Confrontations with aggression and mental health problems in police officers: The role of organizational stressors, life-events and previous mental health problems. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 2(2), 135-144. doi: 10.1037/a0019158

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