Police Officer Effects

The image of a police officer is shown to be very strong morally and mentally but in reality, policing actually has significant effects on the officer’s personal life. Effects on police officers have not been focused on until recently with all the studies, but all of these effects have later described have been involved and have been a part of daily stresses since the beginning of policing. The work life of a police officer effects officers like having to deal with stressful situations, effects on their family, and the perception of the public.

Firstly, many people don’t see what the daily police officer has to deal with. But in reality Police officers have to deal with a great amount of stressful situations on a day to day basis like having …show more content…
Some of these effects can greatly effect a police officer’s personal life including, but not limited to the high divorce rate, the difficulty in balancing work and family time, and officers often bring stress back to their home life. (Ralph Heibutzki, 2012) Demand Medias Ralph Heibutzki, points out the statistics of the group of policing towards divorce as being the second highest in the nation. The reasoning behind this could be from shift rotation and/or working long hours and always being away from home. Also, police officers have a high tendency to bring additional stress home to their families which can cause families to argue and eventually split. Being a police officer puts your career in front of your family because you are often required to work overtime which may cause an officer not to see their family. Often when police officers request for vacation time their application gets cancelled and forced to work rather than enjoying a couple days off with the family and decreasing their stress level. Police officers deal with a lot of chronic stress on a daily basis which causes most officers to bring it home with them. It is almost impossible for a police officer to not bring home the work stress, for example, in situations where the police officer is dealing with a domestic dispute and the issue worsens in some way which leads to the need to use …show more content…
These affects can cause a great amount of stress on an officer by having to act at a higher standard than everyone else, and the citizens usually criticize the bad, but rarely the good. Most citizens have the perception that every police officer is fat and lazy, which means that the officers will in turn get criticized for almost everything they do. (Ralph Heibutzki, 2012)When a police officer is attending police school, they are often taught that they are never off duty and must hold themselves to a higher degree of professionalism compared to the average citizen because everyone looks up to them even if they are not in uniform and if they are doing something wrong, they are just contradicting themselves by arresting someone for something they have done in the past or currently do. (Ralph Heibutzki, 2012) (House, R. 2013) When people are asked the question of what they think of police officers, they often respond with comments like “waste of tax dollars,” and “bunch of criminals in uniform shooting people for no reasons.” They call police this because the media blows everything out of proportion and judge every police under the 2% of police officers that do wrong rather than right. As well, citizens are a bit biased as they hate police officers because they are the ones enforcing their wrong doing by ticketing citizens and giving them a bad day by trying to keep the streets