stress management

You and your partner are a two-person patrol in a rural district of Kansas for a county sheriff’s office. Your area of responsibility is right in the middle of “Tornado Alley.” Two weeks ago, a category 4 tornado touched down at the north end of a town in your jurisdiction and hit a day care. Twenty-two children were in the day care with five care providers. Most of the children were huddled with four of the providers at one end of the structure, where there was little damage. Five of the children, who took shelter with one of the care providers in the other end of the building, were pulled out of the building by the tornado. Four of the children and the caretaker that had been with them were found on a nearby street, all dead from blunt trauma. The fifth child has not been found. The ages of the children are 3–5 years old. 

Your partner is a young man with a wife of five years. They have two children, ages 3 and 4. When the children’s bodies were found, he started to cry. He did his job the entire time with tears in his eyes. You and your partner searched for almost 36 hours without sleep for the missing child, to no avail. Since this incident, your partner has all but stopped speaking. He misses radio calls and is no longer the observant partner that you had prior to the incident with the tornado strike. You thought it would be just a day or two until he recovered, but he has not rebounded, and it is going on the third week. You have concern for his and your safety as well as the safety of the public.

You spoke to him about it, and he told you to mind your own business. The sergeant came to you and asked about your partner because he noticed the symptoms. The sergeant related that he had spoken to the watch commander and was instructed to have you prepare a report of observations, an assessment of the problem, and recommendations for getting the problem solved.

In a report of 3–5 pages to the watch commander of the sheriff’s department patrol bureau, explain your concerns about the behavior of your partner. Identify that your relationship prior to 3 weeks ago was excellent. Explain how you believe this is incident driven and why. Determine at least 2 possible disorders that may be impacting your partner. Provide the watch commander with 2 alternatives in terms of getting your partner back on track.

Group Portion (1)

• Discuss the following with your group in the Small Group Discussion Area:

  How is your partner’s behavior impacting the efficacy of your patrol duties? Explain.
  What are the key symptoms of what you believe your partner may be going through? Explain.

  Why are these symptoms dangerous? Explain.
  How can these symptoms affect you in the short term? In the long term?

• Be sure to come to a group consensus before continuing on to the next 2 portions of the project.

Individual Portion

• Address the following in at least 1 page:

  Identify the relationships the partner has in his personal life that may be related to the day care tornado call.

  Why are these relationships important in this case?

• Be sure to reference all sources using APA style.