Police cope with stress 24/7

Going out on patrol for the first time, rookie officers are well-schooled in the basics: Stop, look and listen for the unusual, always at the ready.

But experts say there’s one major element to police work that only experience can teach — how to deal with a cascade of pressures that go with the job, including public scrutiny, strains on personal relationships and having to make life-or-death decisions involving the public.

“The pressure really starts when you are a recruit,” said Charles “Joe” Key, a former Baltimore City police lieutenant and now a private consultant. “You are somewhat ostracized in the community because there is something about a police officer that changes the dynamics of what people think and say. It’s ongoing throughout life.”

Key said that for years, the many pressures of police work have welded tight-knit communities behind the badge. He called it a lasting “esprit de corps” mentality that is used to help enforce laws in the face of conflict.

“It can have a range of effects and, in the end, like any other person, you set up defense mechanisms, where you find your way of dealing with it,” he explained. “A cop’s sense of humor is often the kind of things other people do not find amusing. For other cops, you have a very few minority start taking it personally, overreact, and put on a ‘king of the block’ mentality. Some other cops get to where even the simplest kind of contact with a citizen can turn from asking a question to fighting for your life in a second.”

Key said stresses of police work, including shift work and long hours, often spill over into the personal lives of officers and police administrators. In the 1990s, he said, data from one survey showed a 75 percent divorce rate among married officers.

“The alcoholism rate is high, too. Suicide is a problem,” Key explained. “All the kinds of things that for people in more routine jobs are not as much of a problem, with cops they are major stressors.”

Key said certain incidents, such as the threat of being killed while off-duty or responsibility to take action while off-duty and even political pressures, can have a lasting impact on quality of life for officers. Then there are issues resulting from on-duty work.

An officer’s widow

Last year, New York City police Lt. Michael Pigott ordered officers to use a 5,000-volt stun gun to subdue a naked man who was standing at the ledge of a building, waving a fluorescent light tube at police. The stun gun’s jolt caused the man to fall to his death, and Pigott, a 20-year veteran, was stripped of his gun and badge and sent to work in a motor vehicle division.

Pigott committed suicide on his 46th birthday, eight days after the incident. His widow blames his fear that he would be prosecuted. His family has sued the NYPD seeking to clear his name, charging “extreme emotional anguish and shame.”

Sheldon Greenberg, associate dean and director of the Division of Public Safety in the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, works with police officers and administrators. A main focus is relieving job-related pressures. One cause is the disappearance of overtime because of budget cutbacks.

“It’s one of the biggest crises in the departments today,” Greenberg said. “Officers aren’t able to keep up with the financial commitments they’ve made, and it’s forcing some of them to leave the profession or squeeze in a secondary kind of employment.”

Greenberg also calls the emphasis on statistics a major source of stress.

“Many departments’ officers are purely statistically driven, so that you can’t deny stats in this job — they are told to generate more stats and more stats and get crime down, get traffic summons up,” he said. “Nobody signs up for that. Nobody generates a job for statistics. That kind of thing eats at you.

“Some politicians could care less about the quality of police work or the handling of less serious calls for service — all they care about is the ability to brag that crime is down,” Greenberg continued. “That’s tremendous pressure on officers because it’s interfering with their ability to do what is right — engaging more in the community, doing follow-up investigations.”

Long hours, tough decisions

Det. Nicole Monroe has been an investigator and patrol officer in Baltimore for 15 years. “Lots of jobs have pressures, but our job requires a lot of dedication,” said Monroe, who is now a department spokeswoman. “We try to make people understand that when they take the job it requires more than eight hours. And of course, there are decisions you make: life-and-death decisions. The ability to take someone’s freedom away from them.”

Monroe said she’s had to shift certain priorities to make the work-life balance successful. Officers help each other, she said, when child-care and special school obligations arise.

Baltimore officers can seek counseling for stress through a program at Mercy Hospital, she said. In the old days, that was not an option, said Key. Then, officers were expected to “man up and take it” if the pressures of the job and the streets built up.

“It’s not a job for everyone,” Monroe said. “I’ve seen people take the job and won’t last five years. There are pressures — I guess it just depends on your perspective.”

Melody Simmons is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.