Stress Inside Police Departments
How the Organization Creates Stress and Performance Problems in Police Officers
Innovations in Policing Series

This book offers researchers, police practitioners, and policymakers a platform for organizational reform and an understanding of how the police organization creates stress, which contributes to reduced officer performance.

This book, based on an in-depth study exploring the relationship between perceived organizational stressors and police performance, indicates which features of the police organization generate the most stress affecting performance, and provides a model of organizational stress that applies to police agencies. While much stress research portrays the operation of policing as the greatest source of contention among officers, this research shows the ever-present rigid hierarchical design of the police agency to be contributing factor of stress that affects performance.

Ideal for scholars, police personnel, and policymakers who are interested in how the police organization contributes to lower officer performance, this book has implications for policing agencies in the United States and worldwide.

1. POLICE STRESS IN TODAY’S WORLD; 2. WHAT METHODS SHOULD WE USE TO RESEARCH POLICE STRESS?; 3. STRESS IN POLICING: WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?; 4. STRESS IN POLICING: WHAT DOES IT LEAD TO?; 5. STRESS IN POLICE WORK: WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?

Jon M. Shane is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Dr. Shane has published in leading criminal justice and policing journals, including Crime Science, Journal of Criminal Justice, Justice Quarterly, Policing: An International Journal of Strategies and Management, and Police Practice and Research. Dr. Shane can be reached at jshane@jjay.cuny.edu.