Police Stress

Stress is the body's way of coping with emotional and physical change. As a positive force, stress provides motivation in order to achieve important goals. However, when stress is unrelenting and out of control, it is a negative force that causes unhappiness, sickness, and even death .Stress is a combination of physical, mental, and emotional feelings that result from pressure, worry, and anxiety. These pressures are called stressors. Some examples of common stressors are; divorce, death in the family, job change, pregnancy, a large mortgage, marriage, and retirement. It should come to no surprise that the stress levels in the career of criminology are very high. The things that some policemen/women encounter are things that most people couldn't imagine. From the threat of having a gun pointed at you, all the way to family problems at home, the stress of law enforcement is in the back of these people's minds forever.

Depending on the nature of the incident that officers are summoned to is the scale holder on how high the level of stress will be. On duty officers are told where, when, and why through a radio from a person sitting in a chair answering phones back at the station. They could be called out to duty on many different levels of assignments. These assignments range anywhere from domestic violence, robbery, shootings, all the way to a homicide. In my opinion the most stressful of calls would be a call for someone either threatening suicide or already having committed suicide. Just the thought of having to see someone dead, coming from their own hands, has gotten to be one of the hardest things to do.

As soon as an officer receives their call, via radio transmission, their bodies tend to tense up. After the body falls subject to so much tension, one's body pressure rises. Next the body can fall subject to cold sweats, tremors, vomiting, nausea, and very extreme headaches. However, the body of the officer also jumps in to a mode of awareness. Since the adrenaline rises in such a fast reaction, sometimes an officer will overreact in an extremely dangerous situation. But, officers react differently to the dangers they hear than the dangers they see.

When an officer is able to see the danger, they have plenty of time to prepare for the situation. On the opposite hand, when an officer only hears, via dispatch, they tend to expect the worst. No matter how long the officer has been with the force, the call always gets to them. There is not one officer that hasn't at least once thought of something happening to them.

External stress is a type of stress that can be caused by things such as real threats and dangers during any shift on a police force. Some examples of this stress can include anything from the public's lack of support to traffic issues. These are only two good examples of what can happen. On the job external stress can have a negative impact on how a police officer performs