The purpose of this paper is to discuss police stress and its impacts on the individual police officer, his/her family, the police department and on society. An analysis of the inherent problems in law enforcement both physical and psychological, and management's approach to them will also be provided.
Stress, defined here as a physical, chemical or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension, exists whenever there is a change in the equilibrium of a man-made-environment complex (Fraser 43). With police officers, the public assumes death on the job is the main factor causing this change in equilibrium. However, that is only a small part of the stress police find themselves under these days. "It's not bullets that get most of them. It's the inability to handle the stresses of the job and not knowing how to make stress work for them rather then against them," says Ed Donovan, a Boston police officer, director of that department's police stress program, and president of the International Law Enforcement Stress Association (Shealey 61).
Admittedly, police work can be dangerous. In 1987, 147 police officers were killed in the line of duty across America. In addition, a total of 21,655 officers were wounded and 65,259 were assaulted with a weapon (Distelheim 52). But experts familiar with police work dispel the notion that bodily injury is the number-one threat. In fact, it is estimated that ninety percent of the time they are in no danger of being killed. John Dineen, president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago says: "It is that unexpected time, the call for domestic violence, when it usually happens. Our families are much more worried about danger than we are" (Distelheim 54).
"Police work is not running down dark alleys in the middle of the night in hot pursuit of a bad guy," says Gerald Bolger, supervisor of the Alcoholism Services Unit of the Chicago Police Department. "A lot of our duties ar...