The Beat Podcast
Speaker: Brandi Burque
Organization: San Antonio Police Department 
Topic: Performance and Recovery Optimization or PRO

Interview Transcript

[00:00]  Welcome to The Beat—a podcast series from the COPS 
Office at the Department of Justice.  Featuring interviews with 
experts from a varied field of disciplines, The Beat provides 
law enforcement with the latest developments and trending topics 
in community policing.
      
[00:16]  Jennifer Donelan:  I'm your host, Jennifer Donelan, and 
today we will hear from Dr. Brandi Burque.  She's a psychologist 
with the San Antonio Police Department.  And today we're 
discussing the program there called Performance and Recovery 
Optimization or PRO.  So, welcome to The Beat, Dr. Burque.
[00:32]  Brandi Burque:  Thank you very much.
[00:33]  Jennifer Donelan:  Tell us, what is Performance and 
Recovery Optimization or PRO?

[00:37]  Brandi Burque:  All right.  So, it was a program that 
was started with our cadets in 2013.  It was a program that was 
developed in conjunction with Air Force Security Forces.  Dr. 
Deloria Wilson is the operational psychologist for Security 
Forces, and her and I have worked together for years.  When we 
worked in the Army together, we found that there was a lot of 
new resiliency programs, new stress management programs that 
were pretty good but we wanted something that was targeted more 
to the culture of law enforcement.  So, we drew upon military 
psychology, police psychology, and mainly a lot of sports 
psychology to develop this training program.  It's a 
comprehensive -- you could call it a wellness, you could call it 
resiliency -- it's just an all-around stress management program 
for police officers and their families even.  And so, how it's 
been developed is we first started with cadets.  We have an 
eight- to 10-hour block with our cadets that we teach skills 
such as what the optimal responses in terms of adrenaline and 
cortisol, and we talk about how to modulate it through 
controlled breathing, muscle control, performance self-talk, 
attention management, a recharging module to talk about sleep 
and nutrition, and mental practice as well, trying to imagine 
something.  And a lot of this has had great influence in sports 
psychology, a lot of scientific evidence to support it, we can 
use it in police too.  And then, I go out with them during 
driving and tactics to reinforce the skills.  And then, we 
developed in a five-hour in-service block so that every single 
officer in the department has been trained in the basics of this 
resiliency program last year.  So every Tuesday of last year for 
our in-service we taught officers on this and now we're 
currently developing a three-day program that's more intensive 
that's taught by me and other officers that focus on short-term 
and long-term performance on the job and how to increase 
wellness in terms of cardiovascular disease health too.

[02:34]  Jennifer Donelan:  And today, discussing on The Beat, 
what do you hope that our listeners, officers from other places 
around the country, will gather from our discussion?

[02:42]  Brandi Burque:  Whenever there's a health problem 
identified, whether that's cardiovascular disease, even mental 
health issue such as suicide, depression, substance abuse, or 
stress, anxiety, PTSD, whenever that's identified in the 
department, you kind of see kind of this one-shot approach to 
something.  It was like, well, now we're going to educate 
everybody on the signs and symptoms of this particular problem 
and hopefully they know how to intervene if we just educate 
people.  And it needs to go beyond that.  So much of our stress 
management programs in law enforcement are just lecture.  It's 
just death by PowerPoint and that's it.  But it needs to be 
embedded throughout the entire department, all the way up from 
leadership buy-in, all the way through different innovative ways 
to do that.  And so, that's why I brought on board police 
officers to help me write the modules of the program because 
they're going to figure out ways to embed it in different 
aspects.  So, we have a daily bulletin, for example, that goes 
out to every single officer every day that has a bunch of other 
stuff and we put in a PRO corner that highlights different 
mindset pieces from stoic philosophy or from sleep hygiene or 
anything like that to try to figure out ways to get this message 
across.  And also for police departments, having a mental health 
provider is incredibly important but a mental health provider 
for police departments needs to be embedded in the police 
department.  They need to go on ride-alongs.  They need to be 
training at the academy.  They need to be doing stuff to 
understand law enforcement and the culture to be able to provide 
effective services that can be used.

[04:11]  Jennifer Donelan:  Can you give us some examples from 
say a cadet perspective, a veteran officer or officer's family 
member, just why they would need or benefit from the PRO 
program.

[04:24]  Brandi Burque:  One of my very first clients when I 
first started with the police department was a family and her 
husband had just recently died of a heart attack and it was 
absolutely devastating.  They had a wonderful relationship, it 
was a wonderful family.  She was on her own with three kids.  
And she always told me, she goes, "If he didn't have a heart 
attack, he'd still be working today.  He loved his job.  He 
loved his job."  And the cardiovascular disease risk, which is 
the number one killer of police officers, was so important, and 
if I could find a way to figure out how to incorporate education 
and training to hit not only mental health but also 
cardiovascular disease, that would be winning.  And so, when we 
looked at stress, obviously adrenaline and cortisol impacts 
cardiovascular disease, also impacts mental health too.  So, a 
program that incorporates all that is important.  We've had 
officers come forward after in-service last year and I remember 
when one of our assistant chiefs had wanted us to do this for 
our in-service class.  And in-service is the most difficult 
audience you could ever teach for, and I thought, "Oh, this is 
going to be horrible because no one's going to like it," or 
whatever.  Consistently every week we had officers come up to us 
and write critiques saying that this is something that they 
needed to hear every year.  And in particular, one officer told 
me in the first time in 22 years, he felt as though that someone 
understood and cared about officer health and wellness for the 
department.  We've even had cadets say they want more of it 
during the academy training.  And even so, even on callouts I've 
had former cadets who are now police officers come up to me and 
just want to talk about an incident and be like, "Yeah, I 
remember exactly what you said in the academy, that's exactly 
what happened, and I really appreciate the training."

[06:02]  Jennifer Donelan:  Let's talk about that again, because 
all of our listeners might not be familiar with some examples of 
the techniques that you teach officers to deal with high 
adrenaline, stressful situations and what they can do to bring 
that stress down in the moment and in the long term.

[06:17]  Brandi Burque:  Okay.  Are you ready for a lecture?

[06:18]  Jennifer Donelan:  I am ready.

[06:20]  Brandi Burque:  We know that there are different 
effects of adrenaline and cortisol when it's surging through 
somebody's system.  And adrenaline dilates the blood vessels and 
lung airways and it gets you motivated for action and that's 
really good, but if you have too much of it for too long, it 
makes you sick to your stomach, weak and shaky.  And then you've 
got cortisol on the other hand which is released around the same 
time.  And it's got great properties, it does what it needs to 
do, but if you have too much of it for too long, you're 
increased for cardiovascular disease, inflammation, high blood 
pressure, all of that.  But also cortisol doesn't make you think 
very clearly.  And when we look at heart rate, for example, when 
you reach a certain level of heart rate your ability to think 
clearly really starts to go out the window.  Your fine motor 
skills fall apart.  All of that stuff.  There was even recently 
a fascinating study -- this wasn't done in law enforcement, this 
was just done in general -- that there's an area the brain that 
scans people's faces and determines whether someone's being very 
supportive or being very critical.  And when it says that this 
person's being very critical, it communicates with an area of 
the brain that's responsible for fine motor skills, and fine 
motor skills start to shake and fall off.  But what's more 
interesting is it causes muscle tension in your forearms and in 
your biceps so that whatever you're holding onto you grip down 
harder.  Well, that says a lot because when an officer arrives 
on scene, nobody's saying, "Hey, we're so glad that you're 
here."  They're yelling and screaming and they're very critical 
especially in this day and age.  So, what is that doing to an 
officer's performance?  Well, we can figure out ways, that's why 
training is so important.  When there was a push to make police 
academies more collegiate, well, I was like, no, because we now 
know this is what happens to the body when it's under that 
amount of stress so we need to be able to inoculate someone to 
that stress so that they can be able to control themselves 
better.  And so, if we can regulate that heart rate down, people 
tend to perform better.  So, we look at controlled breathing, 
deep breathes, because it activates the parasympathetic nervous 
system to decrease adrenaline and cortisol.  So then someone 
thinks clearly, their fine motor skills are intact.  That's 
great.  But we also do things such as muscle control, tensing 
and relaxing muscles, which is done in sports psychology.  And 
then, the more advanced techniques are looking at things such as 
performance self-talk.  So, how you talk about a situation in 
your own head can impact how you perform.  We had one of our 
driving instructors indicate that when he was going through 
driving school, one of the courses he was having a really 
difficult time with and it wasn't until he talked himself 
through that course that he did better.  One of the most 
powerful ones that I think that we've incorporated is from 
sports psychology is called mental practice, and it's imagining 
a task from the very beginning to the very end to successful 
completion but imagining it in all five senses.  And one of my 
good partners at the University of Texas at San Antonio, their 
human performance labs, so sports psychologist, demonstrated 
ways that you can teach mental practice, so you can show mental 
practice.  Because it activates the same muscles as if you were 
actually doing it.  So, they looked at downhill skiers and when 
they go through a simulator, even though they're not actually 
skiing, the same muscles are being used.  So, we tell cadets, 
"Hey.  When you're learning to do a felony stop, mentally 
practice that at night."  And I give them my own stupid example 
because I learned the obstacle course and I was terrible at the 
obstacle course but the more I mentally practiced it, the better 
I got.

[09:40]  Jennifer Donelan:  And mentally practicing it is like 
going through your head like you're on the obstacle course, 
like, "Oh my gosh, I'm coming up to where I crawl underneath the 
ropes."

[09:47]  Brandi Burque:  Yes.

[09:48]  Jennifer Donelan:  So, you're just visualizing it 
through your head?

[09:50]  Brandi Burque:  Everything.  And it activates the same 
muscles as if you're actually doing it.  So, you know, we do 
those things to help them perform better in the academy which 
then hopefully will help them perform better on the job, but 
this stuff can be used at home too.  We tell them, "Hey, you 
don't respond the same way to somebody complaining about the 
neighbor's dog barking that you would to, say, a domestic 
violence situation.  How is that any different than when you 
come home and your spouse is upset about the day or your 
toddler's having a tantrum?  The same skills you use to perform 
well at work you can perform well at home too."  So, it's 
hitting that family piece.  And so, these skills are 
translatable.  We even did a version of PRO for middle school 
girl scouts, we just changed up the terminology.  It still 
works.

[10:35]  Jennifer Donelan:  OK, so, there's the aspect of the 
program for cadets when they're training, eight hours.  Group 
sessions?

[10:41]  Brandi Burque:  Yeah, it's in a classroom.  And we do a 
couple of different exercises to kind of demonstrate.  One of 
the big ones is what we call the zombie exercise, which is I 
have a -- it's a shower curtain with zombie targets and shoot 
and no-shoot targets.  They have five seconds to view what's in 
front of them and they have to write it down.  And then we show 
them how their attention can be misdirected.  And then, 
throughout the whole academy experience, the other instructors 
are enforcing these types of skills, and then when I'm out there 
during tactics or some of the driving stuff, I reinforce the 
skills during briefs and debriefs.

[11:14]  Jennifer Donelan:  And then, for current officers, you 
have the one-day in-service?

[11:18]  Brandi Burque:  Yeah, we did that last year, that was 
five hours.  And then now we're in the middle of developing a 
three-day continuing education program.

[11:25]  Jennifer Donelan:  And then also if there’s an officer 
or his or her family feel like they need some help with these 
skills, they can schedule a one-on-one time?

[11:33]  Brandi Burque:  Oh, yeah, absolutely.  So, what's great 
about our San Antonio PD is that we have three embedded 
psychologists.  We see officers and their families, unlimited 
amount of sessions at no cost.  So, it could be for marital 
counseling, I see kids even for a wide range of different 
things.

 [11:50]  Jennifer Donelan:  Do you find your program’s unique 
among police departments throughout the U.S.?

[11:55]  Brandi Burque:  I think the information itself isn't 
necessarily unique.  I think the delivery is unique.  And just 
as an example that always stood out in my mind, after in-service 
I had an officer, his name is Officer Cliff Burns and he came up 
to me and he said, "You know, I really want to be a part of 
this.  I really want to help develop it."  I met with him a 
couple of times and he said, "I really want to bring kind of a 
stoic philosophy mindset."  And he's like, "A lot of people 
don't know much about it or they have misconceptions about it 
but I think it would help."  And I thought, "I don't know if he 
can --" and he accomplished it.  He accomplished it so well. Our 
mindset module is phenomenal because of him.  And he made such 
an impact when we presented it to our peer support team that we 
had officers quoting Marcus Aurelius on Facebook and Instagram.  
And so, I think it's the delivery that makes it different.  The 
fact that we're embedded, the fact that it's officer driven, and 
that I'm out there helping whenever I can during live training.

 [12:58]  Jennifer Donelan:  Well, fantastic.  And with that, if 
any of our listeners want to find out more, where can they find 
you on the Internet?

[13:04]  Brandi Burque:  Okay.  So, we're developing a website 
but we have a Facebook page, it's called -- if you just put in 
the Facebook search tool "Performance and Recovery 
Optimization," you'll find it, it's the only one there.  You can 
also e-mail me at brandipro2016@gmail.com.

[13:24]  Jennifer Donelan:  And that's Brandi, B-R-A-N-D-I -- 
PRO, P-R-O -- 2016 -- all one word, @gmail.com.  Well, this has 
been truly fascinating to discuss what you all have been doing 
with this program, PRO, in San Antonio.  I just really wanted to 
hear about the buy-in you have from it seems like from the chief 
right down to the actual cadets on the value of this.  Any 
closing thoughts you would like to leave with the listeners of 
The Beat?

[13:48]  Brandi Burque:  I just think having a passion for this 
was something that I just really love and you got to find people 
that have a passion for officer safety and wellness as well 
because that's what's going to make or break any type of 
program.

[14:00]  Jennifer Donelan:  Dr. Burque, I can’t thank you enough 
for joining us today. 

[14:04]  The Beat is brought to you by the United States 
Department of Justice’s 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.  If 
you have comments or suggestions, please email our response 
center at askcopsrc@usdoj.gov, or check out our Social Media on 
Facebook (www.facebook.com/DOJCOPS), on YouTube 
(www.youtube.com/c/dojcopsoffice), or on Twitter (@COPSOffice).  
Our website is www.cops.usdoj.gov.
      
[15:03]  The opinions contained herein are those of the authors 
and do not necessarily represent the official position or 
policies 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.
      
[15:29] END
2