Highway Police Psychological Pressure Source And Mitigation Strategies

An expressway is a major divided highway for high-speed traffic with at least partial control of access.In 1988 the first expressway in the Chinese mainland,Shanghai-Jiading Expressway,was opened to traffic, which put an end to the history of the China's mainland without expressways. Hence the Chinese police force has a new member,the highway police who has administrated the Chinese expressways for two decades.According to an investigation,the police have the strongest pressure sense of all people.Being a policeman for three years a person would see much more the seemy sides of society than what ordinary people can see for a lifetime.Highway police,as a part of the police force,have the commonness of police and the psychological pressure which is closely linked with the highway traffic management.Up to now since what the highway police have suffered from psychological pressure is so large that the phenomena such as lower efficiency,poor management of highway traffic have appeared.The study on psychological pressure on the police in foreign countries originated in the 20s of the 20th century,reached a peak after 70s, especially since 1985,a number of works about psychological pressure on the police have been published,and the overseas psychologists engaged in researches on the police officers focus on the psychological pressure. Domestic research on the psychology of the police started rather late and still on the developing stage,that the earliest information referring to psychology of police cound be found at the beginning of 90s of the 20th century.Compared to foreign researches on psychological pressure on the police,our studies relatively are later in time,and small in number, most after 2001.However,the special field- the research on psychological pressure of the highway police remains blank.In this paper,taking the highway police of Wenzhou detachment as an example,the author tries to make a probe into the sources of the psychological pressure on highway police and countermeasures to alleviate the psychological pressure in order to create a study of the psychological pressure on the highway police.In this paper,by a questionnaire of sources of stress to the police officers with Wenzhou Detachment of the Highway Police,an analysis of the current source of the psychological pressure of police officers has bee made.Through the analysis,it is clear that the hugest pressure among the four main sources of stress,separately from society,unit,family and individual,is the psychological pressure from unit,namely the pressure arising from highway traffic management,and the family source of stress has a minimum impact to police officers.The analysis also shows that the psychological pressure on police officers has six sources as follows:(a) work pressure;(b) poor working conditions;(c) interpersonal tension in the unit;(d) maladjustment to the night shift; (e) ignorance to the physical and mental health of the officers from the unit;(f) inadequate understanding and supporting to the work of police officers from society,family and friends.The questionnaire on source of psychological stress has 100 questions, the highest score is "long working hours,long-term overtime work,no normal rest "(Y9),and the largest psychological impact on the police officers is long-term overtime work and no normal rest.The top question is "boring and monotonous work"(Y11),that is,the psychological pressure on police officers mostly comes from the boring and monotonous work in highway traffic management.In order to alleviate the psychological pressure on the highway police officers,this paper presents a series of measures:first,changing the concept of management to establish a "people-oriented" management philosophy;second,increasing investment in science and technology to improve the police force with science and technology;third,the appropriately increasing cultural and sports activities to create a harmonious circumstance for interpersonal relationships;fourth, strengthening the logistical support to enhance the work enthusiasm of police officers;five,taking care of the mental health of the officers to improve the psychological quality of police officers;sixth, strengthening propaganda efforts to increase understanding between police officers and society.Innovation of this paper:(A) This paper starts a research on the psychological pressure of the highway police.(B) This paper makes a targeted analysis of source of the psychological pressure among the police officers with the Wenzhou Detachment of Highway Police with a self-designed questionnaire.(C) In this paper,the questionnaire of source of psychological stress, adopting the classification method of causes of pressure on the police created by Professor Zhang Zhensheng,reduces the causes of pressure on the police officers to the four sources,namely the source of social pressure,of family pressure,of unit pressure(work stress) and of personal stress.These four sources have covered all the psychological pressure.(D) In this paper,the two factors,the number and extent of the psychological impact have been considered while making the specific analysis of source of stress.Although this paper is based on the analysis of Wenzhou Detachment of Highway Police to discuss the sources of the psychological pressure on police officers,it has a certain universal significance for reference to the entire highway police force.