Overcoming Stress Through Effective Leadership

Police officers undertake a large amount of stress through their work environment and even through their personal life. If the stress load is increased, prolonged, and untreated, the situation could easily become unbearable and lead to harmful circumstances. With an abundant amount of stress over time and withoutearly detection or intervention, the outcome could lead to broken families or muchworse. Other possible results are divorce, early retirement, or even death. Lawenforcement agencies should be concerned about the psychological welfare of theirofficers. To maintain the success of the agency and community perceptions, law enforcement agencies should take the stand to protect the police officers as it relatesto on-the-job stressors. It is important to seek out advice and define procedures or rulesto protect their officers. To help maintain a balanced officer, agencies should try tomeet most, if not all, of their psychological needs. Law enforcement agencies could helpby lowering the burden of stress through education, training, and equipping their supervisors to better understand the psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses from officers burdened with stress. Furthermore, law enforcement agencies could further help their officers from a mental health standpoint by having a departmental police psychologist readily available to evaluate and assist officers who are showing the indicators or have been involved in a tragic event. It is imperative that law enforcement agencies protect the mental wellness of their police officers. In order to maintain a balanced officer, the agency should meetall of their psychological needs through proper training. By ignoring this aspect ofan officer’s life, it could be dangerous to the officer, agency, andcommunity.