Table 1 displays the demographics of study participants. Briefly, 86% were male, 57% were non-Hispanic White, and 54% were a college graduate. More than half of officers were married and 11% had a history of military service. The average tenure was 12 years, ranging from 2 to 34 years.
Table 1. Characteristics of Police Participant Population (n=28)
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%
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Gender
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|
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Male
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86
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Female
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14
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Race/Ethnicity
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|
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Non-Hispanic White
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57
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Hispanic
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18
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Non-Hispanic Black
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25
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Education
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|
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High School Graduate/GED
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11
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Some College or Technical School
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32
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College Graduate
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54
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Masters Graduate or Higher
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4
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Marital Status
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|
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Married
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64
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Divorced
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11
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Separated
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4
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Never Married
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14
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A Member of an Unmarried Couple
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7
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Military Service
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11
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Mean (SD)
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Minimum, Maximum
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Age (years)
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36 (10)
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23, 61
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Tenure (years)
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12 (10)
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1, 34
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Predisposing Multi-Level Characteristics
There were five levels of themes that influenced officer stress: 1) officer characteristics (tenure, regularly riding with a partner, military experience, gender); 2) civilian behavior (resistance, displaying a weapon, behavior indicative of a mental health problem); 3) supervisor factors (micromanagement); 4) environmental factors (weather, time of day, time of year); and, 5) situational factors (audience present, call-types, complexity of situations). Evidence of each theme are displayed in Table 2.
Table 2: Multi-level evidence of themes reflecting high-stress calls for service for police officers
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Theme
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Evidence
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Code Frequencies
N(%)
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Officer-
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Tenure
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When you're a rookie, you got a high head, you want to prove yourself, want to be a hero so you do a lot of things just to try to prove yourself. Now everybody's just like, okay, you've been on the job for at least ten years. You just wanna answer the call and go home.
It takes a lot of experience, because a rookie just wanna go, go, go, go, go. "Oh, I answered 15 calls last night." What do that mean? [Laughs] You know? So you just take your time. Just only one call at a time
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30 (3.47)
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Partner
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You don't want them to show up on your call but you're with the same people all the time so you know who's who, pretty much, so before you even get there, you have an assessment of what I'm gonna be doing or whether I need to watch my back or not.
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40(2.59)
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Military experience
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I come from a military background, as well, so a lot of this applies over, as well. How we react is based on our life experience”
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13(1.22)
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Gender
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Why did you have to go [to the bathroom] all the way back to the station? You were like 15 minutes away." I'm like, "Ah…Like if you really want to know I'm going to tell you and then you're going to be sad.
My partner for the longest time she was my classmate and the stories she would tell like stalking, hit-up all the time.
When I was pregnant, the department didn’t have a policy in place for women to work behind the desk. I had to claim I was “unfit for duty” if I didn’t want to go out on the streets. Even with that, I could only claim to be “unfit for duty” for 6 months before I lost my job, so basically I was forced to answer calls until my second trimester. That was incredibly stressful.
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17(1.29)
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Civilian-
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Resistance
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Gonna be resistance, where you're going to have to take action as far as physical action against a person or protect yourself or your partner from something physical happening when you can see it coming,
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17(2.31)
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Weapon
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Any gun type of call. Anything with the potential for weapons or unknowns
Why are you arresting him? It's just a small gun." And you're looking at him like, "Really?" I mean that's an actual quote, "It's just a small gun why are you taking him to jail?"
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23(1.95)
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Mental health
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Mental health, you know, 'cause you get into a fight – I mean, sometimes it all pans out, but when you're going there you're like – 'cause if you get into a fight, then everybody pulls their cameras out on their phones and it's like "Well look, we're trying to get him under arrest to take him to get some help" you know, but sometimes it works swimmingly and sometimes it doesn't.
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45(3.30)
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Supervisor-
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Micromanagement
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You have to second guess everything because the management here, the internal affairs, the management in general; they don't care about you, and they will make an example out of you, and they'll hammer you. So you have to second guess everything because of upstairs.
We have an official 40 minute rule. So you have to be on a call 40 minutes or less. If you're over 40 minutes, the sergeant call you and say "Why you on this call over 40 minutes?". So you have to explain why you need a breather. Or you don’t explain and go to the next call stressed.
Just sits there and watches GPS, watching what everybody's doing, where everybody is, and just micromanaging the hell out of you
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65(7.04)
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Environmental-
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Weather
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The weather kind of dictates stress, too. If it's cold out, you're gonna ride clear for a little while. If it's hot, you probably won't get to clear but a few seconds, maybe a minute or two and you go into another call.
During the wintertime is we call our downtime every year 'cause it's cold. People aren't out. Your call load goes down. So yeah, you have a lot of low time where you can actually get a 50, but when it gets warm and summer hits, especially, you're lucky if you can go take a pee break.
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10(0.57)
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Time of day/year
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Like just being able to see what's going on better reduces your stress already, because you can see. In the dark you can't. Like you're walking up to a house, but like you literally cannot see if someone's like hiding on the porch pointing a gun at you.
2:00 to 3:00 A, roughly, 'cause all the drunks get out at 2:00, so probably about 3:00 is when it dies down, and then after that, there's usually a lull, unless we're still playing catch up. Summertime, we'll be copping all night long. Days will be catching up our calls.
Friday night, Saturday night, weekends, holidays, the Fourth of July, New Year's Eve. Sports. Any time the Cowboys are playing. Any time they lose. Domestics go up every time the Cowboys lose. Calls go up in general every time the Cowboys play, but more calls come when they lose.
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34(1.31)
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Situational
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Audience
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My focus is taken away from my job [when] having an audience. It would take away from my natural inclinations, how I would actually normally handle the call or handle the job because I'm thinking about who's recording me, what I'm doing.
I've seen them when there's 20-30 people there and it's not stressful to me. But then if you go to a family disturbance call everybody is calm except for one jackass and it's like that makes everything stressful, because then you suspect this one person getting excited it's going to excite the other 30 who are calm as we walk down. He's upset at least but not crazy, crazy like this one guy. So that's what's stressful to me.
And there's a lot of people, and they're all trying to tell you, "Hey, what are you doing?" And they're all screaming, and this, and that, and that usually gets a little higher stress for me
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24(2.67)
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Call-types
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Rape, killings, stabbing, children abuse, women slapped,
For me, I would probably have to say good domestic violence. When I say good, I mean really serious domestic violence calls where, like you said,
you don't know what you're walking into because everybody's so angry and tense and you're waiting for the violence to turn on you, from the victim too. Sometimes that can happen too. Sometimes you go to arrest the suspect, well, the woman's only means of income sometimes is getting ready to walk out the door. Well, she panics and then she turns on you. I've had that happen and that's very stressful
So my most stressful call was when a eight-year-old hung himself. I didn't even know that eight-year-olds had that in their mind to do that kinda stuff.
The highest-stress calls are the assist, because you know something's going down then if somebody is asking for cover. Especially somebody that doesn't ask for cover much. If they get on there and they yell that they never cover, Code Three, that is, that's the worst right there.
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31(3.11)
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Complexity of situations
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Everyone wants to police the police, nowadays, so when you've got all of these elements that are happening at once, I think that's what makes things kind of uneasy.
It's usually the totalitaria of the call, so it's not any one specific call. It's what elements, certain elements,
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21(1.85)
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Anticipation
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And then your partner says he has a bad feeling about this. I had the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Keep your Spidey senses to yourself, man.
I'm gonna be the first one getting [to this call], so that's a really high-stress thought process you're going through as you're going up to these calls or getting ready to go to that type of call, getting out of the car, getting a shield. We were the first ones going up. We were flanking the shield.
I preach a lot on doing visualization exercises. So before the event even happens you've already seen it in your mind. So that when you actually get to it your mind is just like, "Okay we've been here and we've handled this and this is what we're going to do."
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42(3.58)
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Cumulative Stress
We identified four themes that characterized cumulative stress: 1) cyclical risk; 2) accelerators; 3) decelerators; and 4) experience of an adverse event. The themes are denoted in red in Figure 1 and described in further detail below.
Cyclical Risk
After a high-stress call for service, officers did not “reset” their stress levels, but rather stress and susceptibility to adverse events was maintained through the remainder of the shift. Study participants described the experience of response to high-stress calls for service as a “rollercoaster from hell”. One officer reported that “once you have the high-risk stress you don’t go back to like step one. It’s cumulative, so if nothing bad happens you’re kind of coming in right here again”; “What do you do after a high stress call? Go to the next one”. In other words, officers perceived that the cyclical nature of responding to 911 calls caused prolonged high stress. One officer reported:
“If the calls are just routine where it’s just easy. But when you do go to the one where your heart rate’s up and maybe you have to put your hands on somebody or something like that, then just coming right down from that and getting right back into the call answering and stuff is very aggravating and frustrating because you’ve gone from 0 to 100 like that, and then to come back down to 0 and get back in and just start answering routine calls can be very stressful”.
Officers themselves recognize potential for a cyclical cycle pattern to increase the likelihood of adverse events, like use-of-force and/or officer and civilian injury. In other words,
“That’s where things can get raw and can get messy on your next call, if you take that stuff from the previous call into as if it was something really impactful to you and then you go right to another call, that’s where you can potentially mess up and make something go wrong”.
Accelerators
Officers described two features, burnout and work performance, that accelerate the recursive stress cycle.
Burnout
Officers described burnout from jumping call to call. For example, officers stated: “There’s really dynamic calls and you’re going one dynamic call to another dynamic call, and your stress level goes up, and then your fuse gets real short”; “It was [lights and sirens] call after [lights and sirens] call after [lights and sirens] call, and I was tired. I was tired. We still had three or four hours left on shift”; and “You go to a high risk call and your heart rate goes up and your adrenaline starts to pump and then nothing happens and you do it again, and again, and again, it eventually has a lingering effect on your body and I remember it just drains me”.
Officers reported that the burnout can then lead to adverse events even quicker. One officer reported: “It’s the burnout and the other effects that come with jumping call, to call, to call that’ll make it where you screw up”. Another officer said:
“I think where the bad part comes in is when you get the burnout and that’s when the mistakes happen or you do something wrong or something bad happens to you because you’re burnt out or you’re so stressed out to the point where you’re not paying attention like you normally would do.”
Pressure to Move Forward
Officers consistently reported pressure to move to the next call, even if they weren’t mentally ready. For example, one officer reported that his supervisor asked him/her, “Are you done with your call, wink, wink, hint, hint? Cause there’s a call coming out and you’re riding some [unimportant call] and everybody knows you’re riding some [unimportant call]. Go ahead and [go to the next call]”.
Decelerators
During focus groups, officers identified three specific compensating, and related, behaviors that map to decelerators of cyclical stress: 1) taking a break; 2) changing mental state; and, 3) addressing mental health over time.
Take a Break
Officers reported that “sometimes you’re just not ready” for the next call. “You’re already amped up. So when I saw that, that’s why I told myself that ‘You know what? No’. If I need to pull over for five minutes, then I’m just gonna do it.” Specifically, patrol officers have found “to work the system to our favor because you can’t just keep going on calls, especially when there’s 300, 400 calls sitting in. It’s just call, to call, to call.” One officer reported: “I’ve learned now you’ve just gotta take your break. If you get on a high stress call, it could be three or more [high priority calls] holding. I’m still gonna take a little break, go to 7-11, chill out for a little bit, get my mind right; then I go answer for another call. I just don’t clear right away, boom, boom, take another call.”
Change Mental State
Officers found that changing their mental state on the way to the next call helped to attenuate the probability of an adverse event. One officer reported:
“Whenever I leave one call and I’m heading to the next call, by the time I get to the next call, I’ve kinda zoned out of the call before, and I get to the next call and you can even ask me ‘Hey what happed at the last call?’…I don’t remember.”
A field training officer said: “Like I tell my rookies, if you make a mistake, leave it with that call back there. Focus on your call now because if you focus on that mistake, you’re gonna mess up on your future calls”.
Addressing Mental Health over Time
Officers also mentioned the importance of addressing their own mental health throughout their careers. One officer described:
“When you get in that [stress] cycle, if we are already ahead of our mental health, of our decompression and stuff, it’ll make all this stuff more worth it and easier to handle. If we feel like we’re taken care of, if we feel like we can decompress well, and we can tackle our mental health well, we can handle [high stress] because I’m okay up [in my head].”
Another officer mentioned: “If you're not accepting it, you're just like sitting there like not really
talking or not really dealing with whatever you're going through, and you
just bottle it up then obviously you know that doesn't help”.
Experience of an Adverse Event
Once an officer experienced an adverse event, their tolerance for high-stress became a protective intrinsic factor for future calls. For example, one officer stated, “I mean I’ve never gotten that pumped or anything again. And that’s why I don’t get- I really don’t think- I get stressed out as much anymore, because you’ve hit that level. You have that new threshold of stress”; “Once you’ve hit this adrenaline that’s the highest it will ever go, you’ll never hit it again”; “You know you put it all on that scale and you’ll never hit ten again. It’s like, ‘What else you got for me?’”
Many officers reported that tenure influenced this phenomenon:
“the stress doesn’t come as often because you’ve done everything a hundred times, by the time you get to seven, eight, nine, ten years”;
“Especially I would say younger officers they have an even harder time bringing it back down. Like if you’ve been on a while you’re like okay, you shake it off a little bit better and you’re like “Okay let’s go to the next one. It’s over. We are fine, we made it. But a lot of the younger officers or even ones that already have [post-traumatic stress disorder] they kind of stay stuck in the loop at lot longer or they go up a couple steps instead of one I would say.”