VALUE DILEMMAS IN LAW ENFORCEMENT: A Study of Administrative Decision Making in a Police Department

As agents of the state, the police work in dynamic, normatively ambiguous, and conflict-laden political environments. In these settings, various local partisan interests try to influence the police organization. As a result, technological, socio-cultural, and political forces may produce anomalous administrative decisions in police agencies. These forces are "stabilized" by the personal views of the decision makers. This article focuses on a specific case of administrative decision making that illuminates the uneven competition among different partisan actors who seek to influence police policies and practices.     

THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL SUPPORTS ON POLICE STRESS*

Utilizing a theoretical perspective (the “social supports model”) increasingly applied by stress researchers in other fields, the present endeavor explores whether social supports operate to shield officers from the stresses emanating from police work To investigate this issue, 91 suburban officers were administered a questionnaire that contained scales measuring four job-related stressors, four types of social supports, and two forms of psychological stress—work and life. With regard to the stressors, the data analysis revealed that feelings of dangerousness were significantly and positively related to both stress scales, while shift change and court problems increased only general lye stress. It was also found that supervisory support mitigates work stress while family support helps to reduce more general psychological discomfort. These latter results rein force the assertion that future research could profit by systematically exploring the circumstances, such as social supports, which enable police to cope effectively with the more stressful features of their work.