Why police aggression pushes the officers into tragic reactions

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For along time the use of excessive force by police has been a subject and a bone of contention between the authorities and citizens. However lately, its the handling of anger by policemen ending into suicide or even homicide that has caught the attention of the Nation over the seemingly out of hand behaviour.

In the latest scandal, two senior police officers nearly shot each other during a bar fight. Its reported that the two, a DCIO and an OCS had been drinking together before they disagreed.

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It was not immediately clear what the two officers differed over but a heated argument ensued before they drew their guns and it was claimed that they threatened to shoot each other with other revellers opting to stay out of the argument of the visibly drunk officers.

Bomet County Police Commander Naomi Ichami confirmed the incident, however, she claimed that only one drunk officer was armed and the other was just trying to disarm him.

The bartenders, though, contradicted the police boss as they insisted that both officers were drunk and armed.

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Angry aggression theory explains police use of extralegal force. As applied to police behaviour, angry aggression theory argues that the chronic stress of police work along with the inability to respond to the actual sources of that stress increase both the perception of threats and the aggressiveness of responses to perceived threats.

In addition, social isolation of police officers increases their tendency to displace aggression onto visible and vulnerable targets in the immediate environment.

The theory does not assert that these tendencies are necessarily actualised. Indeed, cognitive structuring techniques and stress-reduction policies can prevent such actualisation

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