Officer Fatigue July 2013 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Mora Fiedler 00:08 Hello and welcome. My name is Mora Fiedler and on behalf of the COPS Office I’d like to introduce you to Bryan Vila, Ph.D., Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University. Dr. Vila pioneered the study of police fatigue and currently directs the Simulated Hazardous Operational Tasks Laboratory at WSU’s Sleep and Performance Research Center. Prior to becoming an academic, he served as a law enforcement officer and executive from 1969 to 1986. Dr. Vila, how do you define officer fatigue and what are the causes of officer fatigue? Dr. Bryan Vila 00:51 When we’re talking about fatigue, we’re talking about, on the one hand, being tired, but we’re also talking about the overall amount of wear and tear you’ve had in the last period of time since you last got some sleep. It’s feeling tired, less attentive, all the things that happen when we don’t get enough sleep and that we’ve all experienced. The causes of that in policing is an old street cop—it’s still the same thing. It’s shift work, which isn’t natural. Human beings are supposed to sleep at night, not during the day. It’s hard to get a good night’s sleep during the day. It’s long work hours, erratic work hours, lots of overtime, off duty employment, the things that happen to you during the day when you’re not at work also come to bear. Then the difficult situations you have to handle and the amount of wear and tear they have on you. The dead babies, the injured partners, the 500th drunken couple to go at it in a family disturbance in a year, all of those things. That’s what wears on cops long-term, short-term, and makes them more and more tired. Mora 02:13 How does fatigue reduce organizational and individual resilience in job performance? Bryan 02:19 If we think about resilience as being able to bounce back from all of those horrible things I just listed, being able to take a punch, whether a literal one or figuratively, and come back at it and still be on target and still be able to think and problem solve and handle things. It’s neat that you asked about both the organization and the individual because you have to think about both of them together. As an individual, the things that affect that—largely from medical research; how much sleep have you had, what’s going on in your personal life, what else have you got wearing and tearing on you inside, how much sleep have you had recently—last night, the couple of days before, over the last few weeks especially. Just like everybody else, cops get cranky and irritable and less able to do things when they’re tired. Your domestic life—the things that you carry with you from your home, and your family, and your relationships. Also, what time of day is it. Like I said, it’s unnatural for us to be up at all hours. When you’re at that low phase in the middle of the night, or at the end of a long evening shift even, your body’s ready for sleep. Your brain is starting to shut down. Systems in your body are all getting less and less alert and less and less capable. That all comes together and affects how well you can cope with what the world throws at you on the next call that you go on or when you open the door and talk to someone. You can flip that same ability to cope when you think about an organization. The most horrible thing of all, probably, is you lose an officer in your organization. I was a street cop in South Central LA in the early 70s and we lost a lot of cops. That’s a body blow if ever there was one. For the organization to come back, to take care of business, do their job, be professional, is a really tough thing. An organization, like many police organizations around the country now that’s lost 10, 20, 30, 40 percent of their personnel because of budget cuts over the last few years during the recession. Another example of resiliency is the ability to bounce back from that. If you have an understaffed organization full of really exhausted people who have been working a lot of overtime for several years and haven’t had a raise as far back as anybody can remember, it’d take a lot of leadership to have that organization have the can-do attitude, the ability to improvise and solve problems no matter what the world throws at you. That’s something organizations got to do and it takes, under extreme challenges, it takes a really good cop to bounce back and deal with it under really big challenges. It takes a really well-run organization, a very cohesive organization, to find a way to weather that storm. Mora 05:38 What are the effects of career-long fatigue? Bryan 05:42 Well that’s the $64,000 question, if you will. Fatigue erodes you over the course of a career. It lets the rest of the things you experience erode you more. Not just emotionally, but you have increases in the probability of heart attacks and other cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, diabetes, those sorts of things, certain kinds of cancer, colon cancer and lung cancer in particular. You also have increases in depression, increases in suicide that can come over the long term, just not getting enough sleep. The reason is that getting enough sleep is what lets you recharge, reorganize, and solve problems that seem insurmountable in the short term. Mora 06:40 How does lack of sleep impact an officer’s safety and ability to perform on the job? Bryan 06:47 If you haven’t had enough sleep, you’re less alert, you’re less able to make sense of the world around you, you’re less able to be creative and find a way, like a good street cop does, to solve a problem with minimal hassle. You’re less able to connect with people. You’re more likely to get angry. You’re less likely to be able to control your temper. Cops have to balance being aggressive enough and holding a leash on it until it’s time to fight. That’s harder too. You put those things together with the fact that it definitely affects your ability to drive well, especially when doing what a cop has to do driving a vehicle, not just in emergencies but during non- emergencies. So it increases your probability of making a mistake on the job. It increases your probability of being in a crash or being hurt on the job. It decreases the likelihood that you’ll see everything that you could see in a situation to understand it and resolve it in the best way possible, and it decreases your ability to work with people. Mora 08:03 What strategies should an agency implement to mitigate officer fatigue and sleep deprivation? Bryan 08:10 There are four basic things that an agency ought to do. One, they need to train people that fatigue is a safety issue. You need that alertness edge to do your best on the job. You need to teach people about diet and exercise and personal habits that affect sleep. You need to learn to manage caffeine. You can’t drink as much as you want all day long and then in an emergency when you’ve got to work extra hours expect it to work. You’ve built up a tolerance. Caffeine is a drug; you need to manage caffeine properly. You need to understand how the body works. Not in the details but the basic stuff about how much more tired you get at night and how much less alert you become. Agencies need to teach cops—and they need to teach managers and supervisors—that handling fatigue well reduces the risks for the public, for the cops, for the organization. Most of all, they need to teach them that even if you can’t do all of that, do what you can, do some. Over the long haul, what you’re doing is you’re playing the odds. It’s a dangerous job, but you’re improving the odds that you’ll do it right, that you’ll survive, that you’ll stay healthy through your career. It’s that edge that helps you and they need to be taught what to do and how to do it. The same goes for managers and supervisors, frankly. Mora 09:36 Dr. Vila, thank you so much for your time today. Bryan 09:40 It’s my pleasure. Thank you. Voiceover: Beat Exit 09:43 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 09:59 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.