Stress-Activity Mapping: Physiological Responses During General Duty Police Encounters

Abstract

Policing is a highly stressful and dangerous profession that involves a complex set of environmental, psychosocial, and health risks. The current study examined autonomic stress responses experienced by 64 police officers, during general duty calls for service (CFS) and interactions with the public. Advancing previous research, this study utilized GPS and detailed operational police records as objective evidence of specific activities throughout a CFS. These data were then used to map officers’ heart rate to both the phase of a call (e.g., dispatch, enroute) and incident factors (e.g., call priority, use-of-force). Furthermore, physical movement (i.e., location and inertia) was tracked and assisted in differentiating whether cardiovascular reactivity was due to physical or psychological stress. Officer characteristics, including years of service and training profiles, were examined to conduct a preliminary exploration of whether experience and relevant operational skills training impacted cardiovascular reactivity. Study results provide foundational evidence that CFS factors, specifically the phase of the call (i.e., arrival on scene, encountering a subject) and incident factors (i.e., call priority, weapons, arrest, use-of-force), influence physiological stress responses, which may be associated with short-term performance impairments and long-term health outcomes. Implications of research findings for operational policing, police training, and health research are discussed.

Burnout and Stress Measurement in Police Officers: Literature Review and a Study With the Operational Police Stress Questionnaire

“…However, this topic has attracted more interest in the last decade, with studies developed, for example, by Hickman et al (2011), Luceño-Moreno et al (2016), and Violanti et al (2017), all of whom continue to identify police officers' stress sources and its negative impact on police officers' health and job performance. More recently, Baldwin et al (2019), Wassermann et al (2019), and Ermasova et al (2020) have contributed to the study of police officers' stress and psychological/physical health. Related studies have focused more specifically on occupational stress (e.g., Agolla, 2009;Maran et al, 2015;Gutshall et al, 2017;Johnson et al, 2019), while others have investigated police officers' burnout (e.g., Aguayo et al, 2017;Adams and Mastracci, 2019).…”

“…Moreover, studies have concluded that job stress has consistently increased among police officers in the last decade, and this chronic job stress negatively affects both the person and the organization. Individually, it leads to poor mental health (Baldwin et al, 2019;Castro et al, 2019), work-family conflict (Griffin and Sun, 2018), non-adaptive coping strategies and job stress (LeBlanc et al, 2008;Zulkafaly et al, 2017), emotional labor (van Gelderen et al, 2007), burnout Keinan, 2005, 2007;Rosa et al, 2015), and even suicide (Violanti, 1996;Blazina, 2017;Costa et al, 2019;Grassi et al, 2018). Organizationally, it affects performance (Shane, 2010;Bertilsson et al, 2019;Kelley et al, 2019), counterproductive work behaviors (Smoktunowicz et al, 2015), and inappropriate interactions with citizens, such as the use of excessive force (Neely and Cleveland, 2011;Mastracci and Adams, 2019).…”

Job Stress, Burnout and Coping in Police Officers: Relationships and Psychometric Properties of the Organizational Police Stress Questionnaire

“…Nowadays, policing is considered a stressful professional occupation [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] requiring police officers to cope with danger, uncertainty and unpredictability. Thus, their job stress is increasing, leading to burnout, mental/psychological disorders or even police suicide [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ], forcing police officers to be resilient and to develop coping strategies to face all job demands.…”

“…Furthermore, police officers’ burnout can be related with internal or external aggression, a current social and political concern. Regarding external aggression, excessive use of force among police forces can be a result of high levels of stress [ 2 , 13 , 16 , 28 , 29 , 30 ], which can make police officers assess the situations as more threatening than what they really are [ 31 ]. Regarding internal aggression, several studies [ 7 , 8 , 32 , 33 ] alerted for suicide among police officers due to the easy access to a gun, due to situations which elicit post-traumatic stress disorder, stressful conditions during policing, depression and burnout.…”

Cognitive and Affective Processing of Risk Information: A Survey Experiment on Risk-Based Decision-Making Related to Crime and Public Safety

“…Although behavioral research can help to illuminate psychological processes that underlie decision-making and perceptions, it is oftentimes incomplete and does not necessarily provide data on the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie such processes ( Cacioppo, 2002 ). Indeed, more recent work has begun to utilize neuroscience methods to better and more wholly understand police behavior (e.g., Baldwin et al, 2019 ; Castro-Toledo et al, 2019 ; Hashemi et al, 2019 ). Although there is some evidence on the brain and psychophysiological correlates to dual-process models of processing (see Reyna and Brainerd, 2011 ), such work has not yet been meaningfully extended to risk information processing.…”