Stress Inside Police Departments

Jon Shane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000762891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers researchers, police practitioners, and policymakers a platform for organizational reform and an understanding of how the police organization creates stress, which contributes to reduced officer performance.

This book, based on an in-depth study exploring the relationship between perceived organizational stressors and police performance, indicates which features of the police organization generate the most stress affecting performance, and provides a model of organizational stress that applies to police agencies. While much stress research portrays the operation of policing as the greatest source of contention among officers, this research shows the ever-present rigid hierarchical design of the police agency to be contributing factor of stress that affects performance.

Ideal for scholars, police personnel, and policymakers who are interested in how the police organization contributes to lower officer performance, this book has implications for policing agencies in the United States and worldwide.

Chapter 1

Police Stress in Today’s World

A Look at the Problem

Most people are completely unaware of the issues police officers face inside their organization. Overwhelmingly, the public’s perception of policing is shaped by Hollywood and media images of shootings, fights, car chases and other action-oriented situations. Undoubtedly, these things can cause stress, but even on a grand scale, these aspects of policing represent a small percentage of the things the police do on a daily basis. Amid the moments of excitement and danger that create stressful situations, police officers operate inside a bureaucracy that envelops them at every turn. The morass of rules, regulations, policies and directives set inside a stratified, rank-driven organization has a much larger presence and plays a greater role in the daily lives of police officers than the occasional arrest or car chase (Eitle, D’Alessio, & Stolzenberg, 2014). It is inside this bureaucracy that police officers find themselves in a work environment that is quite constrained, compared with other occupations. These constraints include virtually everything, from what the officer can and cannot say publicly, to how the officer must behave on-duty and off-duty; as if that does not impinge enough on the officer’s psyche, their private behavior and civic associations are also regulated, from whom they can befriend, to the clubs they can join, to their sobriety. The officer is constantly subject to second-guessing and hindsight scrutiny about how they execute their duty and apply their discretion in a given situation (e.g., Brown, 2016; Slate, Johnson, & Colbert, 2007). Moreover, the bureaucracy is uniquely designed to respond to nearly every conceivable action an officer can make, particularly when someone disagrees with those actions (which is when Internal Affairs come knocking).

These organizational arrangements create stress in a different way. Stress from within the organization is practically inescapable since the officers must live with established processes and past practices that loom over their daily existence. While police officers may be able to avoid confronting a violent individual or a domestic dispute, they cannot avoid the Leviathan that governs their personal and professional lives. The consequences may be both personal and professional: alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic discord and decreased performance in their professional life. Once the officer resorts to maladaptive behaviors (e.g., drugs, alcohol, poor diet, lack of exercise) it may be too late to reverse course.

Occupational stress research has an impressive history with more than four decades of sound studies¹ that show clear correlations between certain organizational factors and stress (Arnetz, Nevedal, Lumley, Backman, & Lublin, 2009). How those stressors affect performance is only now emerging as another consequence of stress. Defining performance has been a conundrum for many years and there is no consensus among scholars on how to operationalize performance. Compounding the problem is the definition of stress and the instruments used to measure it in police work. This has led some researchers to move away from generic stress scales and into domain-specific scales that measure the unique characteristics of policing.

This study represents a focused interest in stress research insofar as it seeks to isolate specific self-reported organizational stressors that may negatively impact performance, as well as predict the extent of the impact those stressors have on performance. The basis for the study stems from my lived experiences as a police officer in Newark, New Jersey, where I retired at the rank of captain. As I worked my way up to a managerial level, I realized that the organization itself was largely responsible for creating performance problems with officers, rather than the things officers faced in the field; whether it was insufficient training, politics, unfunded or under-funded mandates or oppressive rules among the many, the employees constantly sought relief and escape from the organization, not the operation. As I saw it, after a few years, many police officers and supervisors working inside the agency in an administrative capacity often wished to be transferred back to patrol “to be left alone.” The freedom and benefits of the radio car were only realized once the officers had a good comparison, such as working in an administrative assignment. The radio car is the officer’s best kept secret.

If performance is an element of police professionalism, then determining which organizational stressors are related to lower performance may improve organizational effectiveness, which is a matter of great public interest. Since the agency has direct control over how it treats its employees, correcting the problems resides directly with police managers, supervisors, labor leaders and elected officials.

Differentiating Stressors in Policing

There are two generally accepted sources of stress in policing, those arising from “job content” and those arising from “job context.” “Job content” stressors, also known as operational stressors, are the aspects of police work inherent in the occupation: operational overtime,² court overtime (Boorstin, 1986; Crank, Culberton, Hewitt, & Regoli, 1993; Davis, 1983; Duggan, 1993; Harriston, 1993; Kroes, 1985; Savery, Soutar, & Weaver, 1993), outside employment³ (Arcuri, Gunn, & Lester, 1987; Bayley, 1994, p. 67; Reiss, 1988; Vila, 2000) and job-related violence⁴ (Amaranto, Steinberg, Castellano, & Mitchell, 2003; Glasser, 1999; Hickman, Fricas, Strom, & Pope, 2011; Komarovskaya et al. 2011). While research on operational stressors has dominated the literature, there is a growing body of research that suggests organizational stressors may be a significant source of stress for police officers, but this literature is limited in its relationship to police performance.

Organizational or “job context” stressors may be a greater source of stress for police officers because officers may perceive them as oppressive, unnecessary and inescapable.⁵ “Job context” stressors include characteristics of the organization and behaviors of the people in them that may produce stress, but differentiating between operational and organizational stressors is not always easy. For example, Newark police officers participated in a stress intervention program developed by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (currently the New Jersey Medical School, Rutgers University) due to significant job-related violent events that occurred close in time. Following the murder-suicide of two Newark police officers (Hanley, 1999) and a hostage-murder incident (Westfeldt, 2000) (two instances of operational stressors), the research participants (rank and file police officers) specifically identified several “job context” or organizational stressors as a direct source of their stress, not operational stressors the program sought to address:

1. Being “second-guessed” in field work (unsupportive supervisors and managers);⁶

2. Punishment for “minor” infractions (nitpicking at de minimis infractions from autocratic managers and over-zealous internal affairs investigators);

3. Lack of reward for a job well done (unsupportive management and constraining civil service and labor agreements);

4. Fear of being “degunned”—having their department-issued firearm and personal firearms administratively confiscated by the department for personal or stress-related problems (likely owing to lack of managerial support); and

5. Low morale—a result of the aforementioned conditions (likely due to unsupportive management and favoritism).

(Amaranto et al., 2003, p. 52)

“Job context” stressors that are likely to create stress and tension in the police milieu include organizational structure (i.e., bureaucracy, capacity and work schedules) (Gajjar, 2019; Monk, 1988; O’Neill & Cushing, 1991; Peacock, Glube, Miller, & Clune, 1983; Pierce & Dunham, 1992; Pilcher & Huffcutt, 1996; Rosa, Colligan, & Lewis, 1989; Scott, 1990) and various aspects of organizational life (i.e., facilities and equipment, role ambiguity and role conflict) (Alexander, Walker, Innes, & Irving, 1993; Brown & Campbell, 1990; Brown, Cooper, & Kirkcaldy, 1999; Cooper, Davidson, & Robinson, 1982; Gajjar, 2019; Galanis, Fragkou, Kaitelidou, Kalokairinou, & Katsoulas, 2018; Gershon, 2000; Glowinkowski & Cooper, 1985; Gudjonsson & Adlam, 1985; Manolias, 1983; Robinson, 1981; Vila, 1996; Vila & Kenney, 2002). These features of police organizations hold over cross-cultural comparisons between US and foreign police agencies. Various stress studies in the South African Police Service (SAPS) revealed similar findings including lack of supervisory and management support (Gulle, Tredoux, & Foster 1998; Koortzen, 1996; also see Violanti, Fekedulegn, Hartley, Charles, Andrew, Ma, & Burchfiel, 2016 who found female officers reported experiencing a 37 percent higher prevalence of lack of support from supervisors (PR = 0.63, 0.48–0.82) relative to male officers), indifference of command staff officers, limited opportunities for promotion, poor working conditions and poor support systems (Roosendaal, 2002). These conditions may combine with various personal or situational mediators (i.e., personality, self-esteem, locus of control and supervisory support) to mediate performance. One emerging human resource management practice in UK policing is to focus on themes congruent with employee needs and organizational intervention options in relation to well-being. A deeper conceptual understanding of how employee well-being is identified and categorized in the workplace and how management uses that information to target interventions provides opportunities for police leaders to use workforce-modeling tools to achieve that outcome (Hesketh & Cooper, 2017).

What Previous Studies Generally Reveal about Occupational Stress

Employees in the human-service professions—those occupations where employees have an obligation for other people’s health, safety or well-being—such as care providers (i.e., nurses, physicians, radiation assistants and general practitioners) (Griffiths, Randall, Santos, & Cox, 2003; LeBlanc & Schaufeli, 2003; Winefield, 2003), correction officers (Cullen, Lemming, Link, & Wozniak, 1985), teachers (Greenglass & Burke, 2003), the clergy (Cotton, Dollard, deJonge, & Whetman, 2003) and police officers (Hart, Cooper, & Cotton, 2002), are particularly vulnerable to stress (Cherniss, 1980). In these professions, stress results primarily from the structural arrangement of the organization and because the agents exercise very little control over their clientele (Cherniss, 1980), the intended outcomes of their service are subject to annoying and objectionable interactions with their clientele (Albrecht, 1979) and they often experience a disjunction between career goals and actual achievement (e.g., the route to promotion; lateral transfer) (Edelwich, 1980; Pearlin, 1989).

Police work is a human-service profession that bears some of these features, since the work is regarded as physically and emotionally demanding. The evidence is mixed, however, regarding the nature of police work as inherently stressful. Researchers, police practitioners, health-care professionals and psychologists, as well as the lay community, often contend that police work is inherently stressful (Brown & Campbell, 1994; Burke, 1994; Cacioppe & Mock, 1985; Fell, Richard, & Wallace, 1980; Kroes, 1985, pp. 32–36; Sigler & Wilson, 1988; Stratton, 1978; Tang & Hammontree, 1992; Violanti & Aron, 1993; Violanti, Vena, & Marshall, 1986; Yarmey, 1990). This belief is intuitively appealing and is bolstered by stereotypical Hollywood images, noteworthy media coverage and fictional portrayals, which enhance the image that police officers are exposed to the seamier side of life that is filled with unsavory or dangerous individuals, critical or traumatic incidents⁷ and unpredictability and boredom (Bouza, 1990; Phillips, 2016), punctuated by moments of sudden adrenaline surges. Some of this is true, but to a limited extent, and the opportunity to deal with crime or criminals is rare (Cumming, Cumming, & Edell, 1985; Famega, 2005; Frank, Brandl, & Watkins, 1997). These conditions are infrequent for many officers who work in a field setting, especially for officers working in suburban and rural agencies compared to their urban counterparts, and even less so for those assigned to administrative functions.

A growing body of evidence suggests police officers are no more stressed than other groups (Hart, Cooper, Wearing, & Heady, 1995; Kirkcaldy, Cooper, & Ruffalo, 1995), including a number of researchers who argue there is little or no evidence to support the conventional belief that police work itself is especially stressful (e.g., Anson & Bloom, 1988; Brown & Campbell, 1990; Hart et al., 1994, 1995; Lawrence, 1984; Malloy & Mays, 1984; Terry, 1981). The research does not support the image that police officers suffer from stress and frustration that is as extreme as many believe (French, 1975, pp. 60, 63; Kroes, Margolis, & Hurrell, 1974), nor is police work beyond the officers’ emotional capabilities (Blackmore, 1978, p. 47; Reiser, 1973, p. 6). There is some evidence that suggests individual coping mechanisms become embedded in a police officer’s personality, which enables them to deal with death and hysteria and accept these facts in their lot as police officers, much the same way morticians routinely deal with dead bodies (Hageman, 1978; Hughes, 1945; Rand & Manuele, 1987; Ward, 1979). Admittedly, “job content” stressors may affect an officer’s well-being or performance (Coman & Evans, 1991). However, as some studies suggest (Cattell, 1967), police officers are an emotionally stable group who have a temperament amenable to dealing with people and, more importantly, “job content” stressors are not necessarily part of the daily hassles related to the organizational structure, which many officers must endure throughout their career.

Implications of Organizational Stress

Police officers can neither escape from nor control daily “job context” stressors. The more officers perceive the organization has failed them—as expressed through the behavior of police management and supervision—the more the officers will unite around an anti-managerial sentiment that arises from a “… fundamental distrust of superior officers and bureaucratic administration” (Pollock-Byrne, 1989, p. 78; see also Brown, 1981, p. 82). The notion that the organization for which an individual is employed is the cause of their stress is counterintuitive, yet studies show officers frequently cite organizational stressors as more onerous than operational stressors, primarily because they cannot control them (Alexander, Innes, Irving, Sinclair, & Walker, 1991; Bishopp, Piquero, Worrall, & Piquero, 2019; Crank & Caldero, 1991; Davey, Obst, & Sheehan, 2001; Kroes et al., 1974). The work environment for many police officers is not often regarded as a source of “job enrichment” or satisfaction (Johnson et al., 2005). Instead, it is seen as an objectionable, stifling atmosphere that must be endured and often leaves casualties of burnout, cynicism and low performance in its wake (Kula & Sahin, 2015; Schaible & Gecas, 2010; Stepler, 2017; Zhao, Thurman, & He, 1999).

The implication is that police agencies can be inhospitable workplaces, where officers must withstand a variety of daily hassles generated internally by the organization. More than four decades ago, one study noted that while t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Dr. Richard Smith
• Preface: Dr. Stephen A. Bishopp
• Foreword: Dr. Karen L. Amendola
• 1 Police Stress in Today’s World
• 2 What Methods Should We Use to Research Police Stress?
• 3 Stress in Policing: Where Does it Come From?
• 4 Stress in Policing: What Does it Lead to?
• 5 Stress in Police Work: What Does the Future Hold?
• Afterword
• References
• Index