Skills Management

3The Emotional Skills of Police Officers in the French Anti-crime Squad (BAC)

In certain professions, emotions, shaped by social rules governing our behavior, must be controlled (Hochschild, 1983/2003). Service professions are therefore the most concerned by research on the regulations of emotions at work. Contact with the general public encountered, in certain professions, can be quite tricky to manage and constitutes a factor of psychosocial risk (PSR). This is the case of police officers of the brigade anti-criminalité (French anti-crime squad), BAC. For these professionals, as first responders on public roads, work and health interact, their activity representing “the place of integration of work and health constraints” (Laville, 1998, p. 153). Beyond this issue of professional health, the influence of emotions at work, generated by the physical and psychological risks which are remarkably significant in extreme environments, on organizational performance, the quality of interventions and the work collective, raises questions. In order to provide some answers, the specific context of the BAC was studied, in the framework of qualitative research, combining an ethnographic approach through participatory immersion, with semi-directive and non-directive interviews with 20 professionals in the field, their managers and the professionals concerned with police officers’ occupational health issues, and the elements of secondary, managerial and human resources management (HRM) documentation. ...