Stress Within The Police Workforce Essay

Stress Within The Police Workforce
Amy Kurtz
Criminology 210-01

Stress can occur in all work environments, but imagine the stress a police officer deals with on an every day basis.   Unlike other occupations, a police officer goes into work with the fear of not coming home.   He or she puts their life on the line everyday in order to keep peace in society.   The choice of becoming a police officer comes with several types of stress: organizational, operational, external, personal, and stress within the family.
The quasi-military structure in police workforces can cause organizational stress because of the constant change in shift hours.   With rotating work schedules, one may lose sleep because of the constant change of when they may work.   Numerous officers suffer from the sleep disorder, insomnia.   Insomnia is a sleep disorder in which one lacks the ability to fall asleep and/or stay asleep.   This can cause numerous problems when it is time for their shift and they are exhausted.
Once one becomes a police officer, they give up their time and are on call 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.   Being on call 24/7 typically means that attending family events or holidays is not going to be easy.   Especially on holidays when people all over are getting together with their families and having holiday parties, means that more officers are going to be needed when something happens.   If a police officer is married and has children this could cause problems within the family because he or she will not be able to promise to be at every one of their child's sporting events or school plays (Gil 1).  
Organizational stress can also result from the bias of one's ethnic, racial, or gender background.   Many officers that were surveyed admitted to this being the most stressful.   Women in particular have more of this type of stress than a male because becoming a police officer is often seen as a male-dominated occupation.   Research done on why so many officers left the police...