Occupational Health and Safety Risks Faced by Canadian Policemen

Running head: Contract Law
CONTRACT LAW
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Contract Law1
Answer:
Introduction:
The police officers play a very significant role in Canadian societies. These officers are
involved in various aspects of the life of Canadian people. The involvement of officers ranges
from daily, general patrol activities to particular criminal affairs like narcotic investigations.
Since there lies a lot of activities within police job, there are several health and safety risks in
such occupation (Knaak et al., 2019). The policemen can be subjected to various health as well
as safety risks. For instance, they are at the risk of homicide and assault. Apart from this, they
even face many psychosocial risks like stress, sexual harassment, stress and even discrimination
(Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Public Safety and National
Security, & Oliphant, 2016). It is needed that these hazards together with the ways to curtail
them must be identified and executed to reduce the risk. Failure to address these concerns can
result into serious consequences for the health of these policemen. Such consequences include
suicide, depression, divorce and diseases. If such consequences are not curtailed, then public
health will be affected too. For instance, when a policeman is under stress or depression, he may
not work properly and perform his duties to the best of the public interest. Fatigue can also
increase the chance of car accidents, thus public life is endangered. This essay enumerates
various occupational health and safety risks which they face daily or at any point in their career.
The essay also highlights the areas in this regard where more steps must be carried out.

Contract Law2
Discussion:
In this part of the essay, several categories of risks are discussed like physical risks,
health issues, chemical risks, air pollution related diseases, ergonomic risks, psychological risks,
discrimination, suicide and others.
Firstly, under the head of physical risks, several factors will be decided (Crawley et al.,
2016). Though Canada has a comparatively lower rate of homicide for the policemen when
compared to other countries, still it must not be ignored. It is observed by Leenaars & Lund that
data regarding murder of the policemen reveals that Canada hold 4th position among 14 countries
in the rates of policemen murdered during their duties in the year of 1970 (Leenaars & Lund,
2017). It is also seen than rate of Canadian policemen homicide was .0155 per one million
people of the population when compared with United States.
It is also observed that assault risk for the policemen when compared with other
professions is quite high in Canada. Various studies revealed that policemen are at high risk of
time loss because of violence. The data for these studies are collected from Workers’
Compensation Board Records (Wranik, Muir & Hu, 2017). There is a high probability that a
policeman may get assaulted when preventing robbery, when arresting or when transporting
prisoners or suspects. The Canadian research shows that the perpetrators involved in these types
of acts of violence on policemen are mainly young, economically, socially disadvantages males.
Another serious health issue faced by the policemen is fatigue (Andersen & Papazoglou,
2015). It is mainly caused due to long working hours of the policemen who have generally a shift
of 12 hours. It is relevant that duty for 12 hours can result into extreme stress and fatigue among
the policemen.