Stress in Policing

The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: Document Title: Stress in Policing Author(s): Hans Toch Document No.: 198030 Date Received: December 2002 Award Number: 1996-IJ-CX-0056 This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally- funded grant final report available electronically in addition to traditional paper copies. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. i ~~~~~~’~~ OF Natisnai Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Box 6000 Wock\;ille. MD 28849-6000 A STRESS IN POLICING Hans Toch With Contributions by: Frankie Bailey Marty Floss *Award number 96-IJ-CX-0056fiom the Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice. This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. To the Memory of J. DOUGLAS GRANT A great colleague, And a good fiiend. This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. a Preface Around Easter of 1983 I was drafted as keynote speaker for a conference on “Stress and Violence in Criminal Justice.” 1 cannot remember what I said there, but I have somehow rescued three vignettes I deployed in the course of my presentation. One item I used related to an air traffic controller and his family. At this period of time, controllers had appointed themselves poster boys for occupational stress, and they were reaping a harvest of more or less favorable publicity. One newspaper story had attracted my attention. It featured an interview with the wife of a controller, who said that her husband persisted in directing traflic while at home. She specifically complained that “he sometimes orders us around like he is ordering planes to land.” The wife also reported (with serendipitously felicitous wit) that it was hard for her spouse to “come down” after he arrived home. The husband acknowledged with appreciation his family’s forbearance and understanding. He said that he recognized the problems he was unwittingly creating, but concluded that understanding the 0 effects of stress (which he said he did) was a far cry from being able to change one’s behavior. He also said that because misery loved company, his group of controllers regularly met to reinforce each others’ discontent. My second vignette was a report I had read at the time covering a workshop on “teacher stress and burnout.” The report had focused on a study that purportedly showed that 20 to 30 percent of teachers were vulnerable to burnout and that 10 to 15 percent were already burned out. The data being cited, as it happened, supported no such conclusions. They suggested that most teachers loved their work, and that they had other satisfying involvements. The highest-ranked item in the study, in terms of intensity, was “I have been involved in outside activities which are as important to me as teaching.” Almost next in line were “I have felt a total commitment to teaching,” “I have felt exhilarated after working closely with my students,” and “I have accomplished many worthwhile things on this job.” The most frequently mentioned items showed the same combination of high-satisfaction themes (e.g., “I have felt I was positively a influencing students’ lives through my work” and “I have had time and energy for friends and This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 2 a family”). The alleged “burnout” items had been supplied by the researchers, thus of necessity had to appear in the rankings, but did so in the lowest intensity, lowest frequency columns (New York Teacher, 198). The third illustration I invoked in my talk was a cautionary article written by Suzanne Gordon, which contended that while “stress management [is] a lucrative new growth industry.. .the real cure to workplace stress may lie elsewhere.’’ Gordon asked, why might a worker be tense? She responded, “It’s obvious. Your superior has just ordered you to work overtime; management has been monitoring your telephone calls; you’re trying to adjust to the new video display terminals the company has just installed to make processing information easier. Anyone working under these conditions is entitled to get uptight” (Gordon, 1980, p. 39). Gordon concluded that “programs on ‘stress’ seem unlikely to address the deeper causes of work, tedium, and powerlessness within the organizational hierarchy” (p. 40). ****** e As I reappraise the odds and ends I accumulated two decades ago, I discover that they happily merge with my thinking today. I am forced to suspect that my own biases have not appreciably changed, and that they may inform (or contaminate) the work that is reported in this book. It seems therefore appropriate at this juncture for me to surface one or two of my preconceptions. I have long been concerned with occupational stress because I think the problem is important? but I have felt that the concept of “stress” has been frequently oversold. Some of my problems may have to do with the concept itself “Stress’? is a transactional construct, which means that it refers to a process that links features of the human environment (stressors) with reactions to these features by persons (stress-related behavior). But the sorts of links that are at issue are complex and difficult to pin down, which invites tenuous extrapolations. The problem starts with the inception of the stress process. In theory, a stressor is as a stressor does. In other words, the stressor produces stress, and is not a stressor if it does not produce stress. If I retain my equanimity while I am exposed to inhospitable circumstances (and This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 3 @ subsequently am no worse for wear), I am presumptively not under stress. But I may come to see myself as an exception to a rule, as somehow coping with circumstances that overwhelm those made of less exceptional stuff. I then may come to feel that I ought to be stressed, but somehow am not, and this situation is compounded when I am repeatedly told about my stressed colleagues, or my colleagues who are assumed to be stressed, and I find myself attending social conclaves (such as the convivial seminars of controllers or burnout workshops for teachers) in which stress for my occupation is defined as a normative response. Work environments such as mine can thus be defined by their incumbents as stressful, even though more disadvantaged situations-like exploitive third-world sweatshops and near-genocidal coal mines-might not be defined by their denizens as stressful. Subjective definitions of what is stressful are, of course, one of the psychological links in - ~~ ~~ the stress transaction, and are a component of the stress concept. If one is affected by a stressor, 0 one may be expected to become aware of the fact. One can similarly become aware of one’s reaction to the experience. But one can be mistaken in one or another perception, especially if stress-related definitions happen to be more congenial or fashionable or palatable than are alternative definitions, or even blatantly self-serving. The controller’s wife may thus be according her “stressed” husband the undeserved benefit of a rationale for his habitually boorish dealings with his family. Symptomatic behavior is more easily attributed to stress if an afflicted individual happens to be subjected to pressures or constraints at work. It may then be uninviting to postulate that the same person might manifest the same kinds of symptoms under more hospitable circumstances. An alcoholic who happens to have a difficult job is phenotypically indistinguishable fiom a worker whose drinking is a reaction to his situation and therefore a symptom of occupational stress. More seriously, if a clinically depressed person also has grounds for situational depression, one may blame his suicide on his job. 0 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 4 e The converse also holds, as Suzanne Gordon suggested. Pathogenic environments tend to intersect with vulnerabilities to their destructive effects, producing problems for persons who would otherwise not experience them.

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