The Beat Podcast
Speaker: John Doucet 
Organization: Los Angeles Police Department
Topic: Police Well Fit Together Officer Wellness Program

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:  Hello.  I'm your host, Jennifer 
Donelan, and today we will hear from Police Performance Auditor 
4 John Doucet of the Risk Management Division of the Los Angeles 
Police Department.  Our topic today is the officer wellness 
program that the LAPD is in partnership with Pepperdine 
University.  Welcome to the show, John.

[00:35]  John Doucet:  Thank you for having me.

[00:36]  Jennifer Donelan:  I find this subject so interesting 
and needed, the officer wellness program.  Give us a brief 
description on what you're doing at the Los Angeles Police 
Department.

[00:46]  John Doucet:  This partnership with Pepperdine 
University has resulted in a conceptual program called Police 
Well Fit Together.  The goal of the program is to provide our 
officers with skills and abilities to affect long-term lifestyle 
changes so they can enhance their physical and emotional 
wellness.  The outline of the program as it stands now is that 
officers will engage in a 12-week wellness program that includes 
targeted exercises to improve tactical fitness.  We'll develop a 
phone app that's going to help them assist in tracking healthy 
behavior.  And over that 12-week period, there's going to be 12 
team building activities.  Just a side note, this program is 
still in the development stages and it's contingent on funding 
for full implementation.  

[01:30]  Jennifer Donelan:  Why do you have an interest in this 
topic, especially this program?

[01:34]  John Doucet:  Risk management division where I work was 
formed in early 2015 and our goal is reducing physical, 
financial, and organizational harms in four different areas.  
This include employee involved traffic collisions, workplace 
conflict, uses of force, and workplace injuries.  Of the four 
areas, workplace injuries is the most interesting to me and the 
organization is because it has a direct impact on our officers, 
and our officers are our most valuable asset.  As we explored 
the causes of injury over time, we found that sprains and 
strains were a leading cause.  Since our philosophy and approach 
to risk management at the LAPD is reduction of harms, our goal 
is to find ways to reduce the sprains and strains that our 
employees are experiencing.  The best approach in our view would 
be to prevent these injuries before they happen.  By partnering 
with an academic institution such as Pepperdine, they can 
provide the expertise in exercise physiology and psychology that 
will enable us to enact a program such as this.  It should be 
noted that our partnership with Pepperdine University is a vital 
part of our wellness strategy overall but it's one of many 
approaches that we're developing or using to try and impact our 
employee wellness.

[02:59]  Jennifer Donelan:  How did your partnership with 
Pepperdine come about?

[03:03]  John Doucet:  We have an officer in risk management 
division who was a graduate student at Pepperdine University in 
their conflict resolution course.  She was instrumental in 
helping us develop a conflict resolution course for supervisors 
in partnership with Pepperdine University.  We've held a number 
of courses and trained hundreds of our supervisors in conflict 
resolution and the feedback has been excellent.  Our employees 
love it.

[03:30]  Jennifer Donelan:  How does your role within the risk 
management division relate to this topic as well as this 
program, Police Well Fit Together?

[03:37]  John Doucet:  I'm currently the officer in charge of 
the analysis and evaluation section of risk management division.  
Among other things, my unit analyzes workplace injury data to 
identify trends, find out how our employees are getting hurt, 
what body parts are being injured, et cetera.

[03:52]  Jennifer Donelan:  You mentioned earlier as you talked 
about the causes of injury over time and one of them was sprains 
and strains.  Can you expand a little bit on it?  Is it like 
from workplace or just like the constant use or just plain, old 
silly activities that everybody does during the day?

[04:06]  John Doucet:  A good question.  It's actually a 
combination of all those.  Some officers are hurt of course in 
conducting police activity, trying to apprehend a subject, 
chasing after someone, et cetera.  We also found a lot of our 
injuries are occurring during normal, everyday work activities.  
For example, lifting a war bag into a car or walking up and down 
stairs.

[04:27]  Jennifer Donelan:  Yep, sometimes it’s that mindless 
activity that gets us.  What is your goal on discussing the 
topic today with The Beat?

[04:34]  John Doucet:  Well, I think that officer wellness is 
incredibly important from several points of view.  First, taking 
care of your employees, making sure they're emotionally and 
physically fit before they deploy to the field, it's just the 
right thing to do from an organizational standpoint.  Secondly, 
a fit officer, one who's emotionally and physically well can 
provide the best level of service to the community.  And the 
mission of the LAPD is, dependent on our ability to field deploy 
officers, providing for employee wellness ensures that we can 
fulfill our mandate to protect and to serve.

[05:11]  Jennifer Donelan:  From what you've been saying today, 
it seems like you have a vested interest in the program and it 
seems like you have the full support of LAPD.  Is that the case?

[05:19]  John Doucet:  That's correct.  Everyone from the chief 
and all the command staff down understand the value and 
importance of wellness when it comes to our employees, both 
sworn and civilian, and we have the backing of the chief on this 
proposal, definitely.

[05:36]  Jennifer Donelan:  Do you have any personal experience 
with officers that makes this program for Police Well Fit 
Together more vital for you to see success?

[05:45]  John Doucet:  As a data analyst, my job tends to look 
at the higher level statistics, so I don't see individual 
officers necessarily in the data sets that I look at.  But from 
a personal point of view, I have many friends and many coworkers 
who are sworn officers and some of them are very tenured and 
I've seen the toll that the job can take after doing it for 
years.  So, I really want to see a program such as this come 
into existence in the LAPD and hopefully we can see better 
outcomes for these officers.

[06:21]  Jennifer Donelan:  And I assume just because it makes 
logical sense that a healthier officer means less injury, less 
time off work, more savings or at least paying for itself over 
time.

[06:32]  John Doucet:  That's what we're hoping.  Cost is a 
secondary concern.  The wellness of the employees are our first 
concern.  But, yes, you're correct.  We do hope that there will 
be some cost savings in the end on this.

[06:48]  Jennifer Donelan:  I know this program just started 
within your division in 2015 and we’re in the initial pilot 
stage.  You mentioned earlier something about the LAPD approach 
to risk management is the reduction of harms.

[07:00]  John Doucet:  Correct.

[07:01]  Jennifer Donelan:  That’s interesting, reduction of 
harms.  When did you first become aware of this concept, of 
reduction of harms, and what's your source or background with 
that?

[07:10]  John Doucet:  My director, Arif Alikhan, was actually 
the person who discovered the author -- well, discovered is the 
wrong word but he became aware of the author, Malcolm Sparrow, 
who is a risk management expert and he wrote a book called The 
Character of Harms.  The point of the book is that traditional 
risk management programs have looked at risk from point of view, 
"What can we do to prevent X from happening?"  We've kind of 
changed that paradigm a bit.  The goal is not to look at what 
might happen, that is important, but what we want to do is look 
at what is causing physical, organizational, and financial harm 
to the LAPD right now.  In other words, what's hurting our 
employees, what's costing us money right now?  And that's the 
tack we take when we do our data analysis and develop our 
strategies for risk management.

[08:06]  Jennifer Donelan:  How is the Police Well Fit Together 
program unique from anything else that might be at other police 
departments across the country?

[08:13]  John Doucet:  There were many programs out there that 
looked at officer wellness but they tend to be a single-subject 
focus.  They might focus on physical fitness or emotional 
resilience.  But from what we found, there were no single 
programs that combined all aspects of officer wellness, and we 
wanted to look at it from a more holistic point of view, combine 
the physical fitness aspect with the emotional wellness aspect. 

[08:45]  Jennifer Donelan:  Well said. So earlier you mentioned 
the book, The Character of Harms by Malcolm K. Sparrow, so we'll 
certainly be listing that with our podcast as a resource for any 
organization or officers out there that want to find out more 
about officer wellness through the reduction of harms as well as 
Police Well Fit Together.  Can they contact you or your 
department if they have further questions about what's happening 
with the Police Well Fit Together program?

[09:12]  John Doucet:  Certainly.  The best contact would be by 
e-mail and my e-mail address is N, as in Nora, 3852@LAPD.online.

[09:21]  Jennifer Donelan:  Any closing thoughts or words for 
our listeners today about Police Well Fit Together?

[09:26]  John Doucet:  I just want to say overall that I implore 
people to remember that officers are the protectors of our 
society, they're the frontline, and we owe it to them to give 
the best opportunity to obtain and maintain maximum wellness.
      
[09:39]Jennifer Donelan:  Fantastic.  Thank you so much for 
coming on our podcast, John.  We certainly do want the Police 
Well Fit Together program to continue and we look forward to 
finding out more about your process as you move from concept to 
implementation.

[09:55] John Doucet:  Thank you for having me.  

[09:57] The Beat is brought to you by the United States 
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[10:55]  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. 
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[11:19] END
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