The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact worldwide. With the constant mutation of the virus, the escalation of public health emergencies has severely affected people’s normal lives globally. To maintain social stability, the police have engaged in maintaining social security and public order. In addition, they were responsible for helping the health administration carry out additional police work, such as patient isolation, home quarantine control, and transport of epidemic prevention materials (1, 2). When they perform their duties, they were challenged by the situation of the infected people and their own fears caused by COVID-19 pandemic, the police officers will face great psychological pressure of exposure to the virus (3). The rising number of infected or COVID-19-related fatalities among police officers is problematic. Community police are the largest number of police officers who stick to the front line of the prevention and control of epidemics in public security police stations (4).

As such, police officers may experience greater negative emotions, which can lead to more severe mental health issues. Attention has been devoted to the important role of police officers’ mental health. Tian Yong et al. noted that the positive detection rate of psychological problems among prison police was 54.63%, which was significantly higher than that of other people in China (5). This emerged COVID-19 pandemic has led to changes in the police’s routine activities. It even caused most police to suffer from fatigue caused by unconventional work tasks. According to Xinhuanet, a total of 22,930 police officers and more than 7,200 vehicles have been invested in Hubei Province to fight the pandemic (6). They were in long-term service, fully quarantined working mode, and delivered high-intensity emergency services. Approximately 73% of police officers reported a significant increase in work intensity and workload during the COVID-19 pandemic (7). Similarly, it is worth noting that about 99.31% of medical staff reported they faced high work risk and workload, and 28.60% of them worked more than 50 h per week in the COVID-19 pandemic (8). Under the extreme work pressure of epidemic prevention and control work, public security officers are faced with excessive exhaustion of psychological resources and physiological exhaustion. Based on transactional stress theory (9), stress results from the individual’s perception of a discrepancy between the subjective negative appraisal situation on him or her and his or her coping resource demands in a particular situation (10). The epidemic exacerbated police role conflict, and they became vulnerable to the psychological crisis. Specifically, the continued increase in stress at work may lead to emotional exhaustion, and it further affects individual’s chances of developing depressive symptoms (11).

Perceived risk may be defined as the perceived likelihood of personally encountering a hazard (12) and cognitive judgment of their susceptibility to risk. Although moderate risk perception contributes to raising people’s level of alertness, which is beneficial for individual survival and creation, it can also be exacerbated and amplified by intrusive catastrophic thoughts. The heuristic effect indicates that people react to the hazard, not only influenced by objective information but also on the basis of their direct feelings (13). Human beings might perceive risk as more threatening when they approach it gradually. For instance, life-threatening stimuli from a high-risk work environment have negatively impacted police. Police officers were fearful of being infected or even dying while helping to transport and quarantine confirmed patients during the pandemic. Thus, cognitive assessment and emotional judgments are often skewed by negative perception (14).

Although the prevalence of mental illness among officers has been documented, studies focusing on the mental health of police and its influencing mechanism in the COVID-19 epidemic still have a knowledge gap. A previous study was based on the psychological state of health care workers (15–17); unfortunately, the research on police officers only describes the level of change in their mental state but ignores the impact and boundary conditions of police officers’ special working characteristics. Therefore, to better understand the impact of work stress and perceived risk on the mental health of police officers in Wuhan city during the epidemic period, we conducted this survey to assess the prevalence of current symptoms of mental illness among the police and identify the psychological factors related to their mental health.

Based on the literature presented above, we formulated three hypotheses:

Among the samples, there were 206 males, accounting for 68.21% and 31.79% were females. The majority of participants were 26–35 years old, accounting for 36.75%. Nearly 68.87% of civilian police are married. A total of 52.65% of police officers had been in the position for more than 4 years. The civilian police who gained a bachelor’s degree account for more than 50%. Approximately two-thirds of police officers have work experience in COVID-19 epidemic prevention. A total of 38.81% of them spent more than 8 h per week on epidemic prevention work (Table 1).

According to the detection criteria of SCL-90 (23), the overall symptom severity distribution is shown in Table 2. The results showed that 37.75% of police officers scored 160 or above, 26.82% scored ≥ 2, and 38.74% of police officers scored ≥ 43 in positive items. In the 10 dimensions of the SCL-90 subdivision, the positive items ranked from high to low were obsessive–compulsive, depression, interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, somatization, paranoia, anxiety, psychosis, and phobia.

Meanwhile, this study was compared with two norms’ results in Table 3. First, compared with the medical staff norm (16). The results showed that the SCL-90 dimension scores of police officers were significantly (P < 0.001) higher than those of the medical staff norm. This means that the psychological problems of the police are more serious than those of medical staff. Second, this study also compared with the military SCL-90 norm reported by Wang Huanlin et al. (24). Only one dimension (interpersonal sensitivity) of scoring among the police officers was lower than the military norm. On the other hand, the police offices had higher scores in the depression, somatization and psychosis dimensions than the military norm.

This study has several limitations. First, we did not collect biological characteristics such as physical health and obesity data. These factors may affect the mental health of police officers and lead to potential residual confounding biases. Second, the participants were all from Wuhan, Hubei Province. Future studies should validate the findings using different samples of front-line workers from other provinces. Third, this cross-sectional study did not precisely reflect the dynamic mental health status of police officers during the COVID-19 epidemic. Thus, a longitudinal study design could be conducted for future research.

In this study, the results showed that front-line police officers tended to show a higher prevalence of symptoms of mental disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings highlighted that age, marital status, and education level are important demographic factors affecting the mental health of the police. The greater the work stress and risk perception of police officers, the greater the negative impact on mental health. Furthermore, it is necessary to attach importance to the improvement and cultivation of consciousness in mental health screening among police officers. Policy-makers and social psychological health care organizations should establish an internal mental health problem handling team and inform innovative stress coping strategies to effectively promote police officers’ mental health.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of Wuhan City College. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

JW contributed to conception and data curation and was responsible for writing original draft preparation and revising it critically. DL took responsibility for formal analysis and review and editing. QW contributed to project administration, interpretation of data, organization, and coordination. MX and JX were responsible for administrative, technical, or material support and supervision. XY supported participant recruitment and data analysis and interpretation. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This research was supported by Natural Science Fund of Hubei Province (2022CFB365).

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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