The Vulnerable Police? – Health and Negotiation in the Police

In capitalist democracies, health and stress of police officers has long been the subject of both political debate and extensive research. Psychological research in particular takes a quantified view of the stress experienced by police officers and comes to the conclusion that stress, workloads etc. are very high. However, little attention is paid to how these stresses can be understood using a sociological, qualitative research logic. How are police workloads constructed beyond their metrification? What role does social change (using the example of migration) in the context of a hierarchical police culture and the growing role of health play?

This is where the ethnographic research comes in and asks how police officers interpret their everyday work in times of social change and what subjective work and health stresses they perceive. This locates the study in the research field of qualitative health research. As part of a field study lasting several weeks in a police station that also includes a refugee camp, participant observations and ethnographic interviews were conducted. Subsequently, guided interviews were used for contrasting purposes and analyzed using the research logic of grounded theory.

The results show that the police, like other areas of the German administration, are subject to economization processes. They are required to make their work visible and measurable. These new paradigms are implemented extensively in the policing of migration and create highly meaningless work for Police officers. This senseless work, in combination with the highly hierarchical organization of the police, leads to health problems, which are mirrored at street cop level in increased sick leave (in the sense of absenteeism). Because of the additional work, however, the police are demanding more staff and more competences. The complex and ambiguous relationship between work and health can therefore be better understood through a qualitative research.