While I agree with all the rest of your post, I 100% disagree with your openning line. I'm simply not convinced that many people recognize how difficult police work is. You are always dealing with people who are at their very worst; their angriest, their most violent, their most broken, sad. At the very least you are ruining someone's day because you're giving them a speeding ticket. Your job is to put yourself into dangerous situations and end them. In other words, you are surrounded by negativity, anger, resentment and sadness.
I am very curious about the list dozens of jobs (outside of all first responders) more stressful than being a police officer.
I hate replying to posts when I only have a minute, but first off, let me be clear. I am not saying police jobs are not stressful, they are incredibly stressful. So lets get that out the way.
All I am saying is that it is not "the most stressful" and that there are plenty of jobs more stressful.
First off, I guess we have to define what stress is, and i don't have time to do that adequately but I will say a situation in which lives can be put at risk either directly or indirectly by your actions and/or whatever situation environment you find yourself in.
So in no particular order:
Jobs in the medical professions (Surgery, assisting surgery, etc), working the graveyard shift at any convenience store in low income areas, logging, certain types of construction, various types of high power system electricians, a decent amount of combat related jobs in the military, various high tech jobs in which you work around substances that if released would not only kill you instantly but could even wipe out a few blocks around where you live (I worked one of those jobs),
I'll stop there. Again, i'm not sayign police work is easy, but this notion that it is so stressful that we should automatically forgive all manner of incompetence and bad judgement is something I vehemently have to reject and through the bull excrement flag on every time it comes up. I'm all about logical consistency and I find that a majority of arguments used to "excuse" bad police behavior are not logically consistent and logically applied to other areas. We quibble and use logical fallacies to explain why it is different and we do so in a way we do not do for anything else, which is a strong indicator of cognitive dissonance.
I have to run but that is my response