All In A Good Day's Sleep

Nov. 29, 2006
Police and rotating shifts.

Garbage bags on the windows, white noise running in the background and over-the-counter sleep aids: Worn-out officers have tried just about everything in their quest to grab a few Z's.

Rotating shifts — working days one week and midnights the next — can lead to a jumbled body clock and an even worse disposition. Short of drinking on the job, there's little more debilitating to an officer's performance than sheer exhaustion.

Sure, it's a given cops won't always have enough sleep. But putting in long hours on a drug round-up, homicide or even a natural disaster are the kinds of details fueled by equal jolts of enthusiasm and adrenaline. Shift work — especially rotating shifts — go beyond the occasional and become a lifestyle. But one that's very dark and draining and can lead to health problems, bad judgment and short tempers.

Police executives have puzzled for years over how to put officers on the street most effectively. Countless hours have been dedicated to working and reworking the manpower allocation and distribution formulas departments use. Patrol coverage stands as one of the most critical and difficult staffing challenges. This is particularly true in smaller agencies where a cold or the flu can wreak havoc with the duty roster.

A hard look at the practice of rotating the line's shifts reveals it's still alive and depriving officers of their sleep, even in some larger departments, although not all change rotations weekly. As for slumber, it never seems to get easier to climb in bed as the sun comes up, but officers all across the country do it every single day.

Asleep at the wheel

Bryan Vila, professor of Criminal Justice at Washington State University literally wrote the book on police officers and sleep. The author of several volumes, including "Tired Cops: The Importance of Managing Police Fatigue," Vila doesn't simply theorize about dead-tired cops from a swivel chair in his office — he was one.

Vila began his police career in East L.A., working as a patrol sergeant, eventually moving on to take the helm of his own agency. That's when he started looking critically at the impact fatigue has on officers.

Lack of sleep in the law enforcement community is the 600-pound gorilla in the squad room. Officers train to react to the guy with the gun, the box cutter, the boot knife. Alcoholism, suicide and domestic issues receive wide attention. Stress from dealing with split-second decisions and the consequences have been examined as thoroughly as a newborn baby — from head to toe and all points in between. But lack of sleep, probably the most common condition adversely affecting officer performance, is often ignored. Why? Maybe, Vila says, because every department's gorilla is unique.

"Ranging from single-officer departments to ones like Los Angeles or Houston, they all have different needs," Vila says.

Because there's no one-size-fits-all solution to the deployment of personnel, those in charge tend to pick a formula and stick with it, even if it's sucking the life right out of the line. As every supervisor knows, change comes hard for criminal justice agencies, not because they can't do it (on the contrary, they adjust to new laws, new weapons and drugs on the street, etc., every single day) but because they arrange their lives around their schedules — not their schedules around their lives. And those lives — the off-duty ones — are a big chunk of what goes wrong when officers are terminally tired.

"It makes it hard to manage family life," Vila says. "Child care and scheduling become terribly difficult problems."

Police executives champion healthy home lives because good family relationships create better attitudes and a stronger work ethic in the ranks. Yet, many officers work with the added stress of exhaustion, which has a domino effect on their personal lives.

And that leads to this comparison from Vila: think about little kids when they need a nap. They're cranky, unreasonable and difficult. Now apply that same exhaustion to adults. Put them in a uniform. Give them a patrol car and lots of authority. What's the result? Cranky people with guns and nightsticks.

Vila points out the parts of the brain first affected by lack of sleep are those that govern the moral center, consequences and arousal and response to situations. "It's basically a vicious cycle that reduces your ability to deal with stress, causes you to lose perspective and patience, become more stressed and lessens the ability to deal with fatigue," Vila says.

To put the problem in the proper perspective, as Vila says, tired officers make bad decisions, have slower reaction times and are grumpier. As the sleep deficit continues to pile up, they suffer collateral damage. In the worse case scenario, bad decisions become catastrophic, reactions times slow to a geriatric rate and grumpy goes ballistic. The bottom line: overly fatigued officers make for one really sweet case of agency liability, not to mention bad press, the minute they make a mistake.

How the human body works

Quality sleep is as essential to good health as adequate water, vitamins and exercise. Maybe even more so, because lack of sleep can not only affect mood and performance, but make blood sugar elevation, strokes and heart attacks more likely.

Whether and how a person sleeps ties into a phenomenon known as the "circadian rhythm." Circadian comes from the Latin word meaning "24 hours," thus circadian rhythms refer to the biological processes that cycle within a day's time.

William Kohler, MD, DADFM, of the Florida Sleep Institute says most humans are predisposed to sleep when it's dark and rise when it's light. The brain is geared to slumber most effectively in the early morning hours, from about 1 a.m. to 2 a.m., until about 5 a.m. In the afternoon, the body clock again dials down awareness and prefers a pick-me-up nap for an hour or two starting at about 1 p.m. or 2 p.m., a condition many countries recognize and accommodate with "siestas."

Kohler explains that "Light is a prime effector of circadian rhythm timing. Bright light makes it harder to adjust [to daytime sleeping]."

As the body ages, it's common for sleep patterns to change or become disrupted. Shifting hormone levels, diseases and disorders affect the length and quality of rest. Kohler says that while the long-term effects of jumbled sleep still rest under the microscope, there's no doubt about what happens in the short-term. Vila's description of stressed-out, fatigued cops with low boiling points and delayed reaction times is right on the money.

Like the old joke wherein the guy tells the doctor "It hurts when I do this" as he smacks his head against the wall, to which the doctor replies, "Then stop doing that," the best way to avoid rotating shift burn-out is to do away with rotating shifts. Right?

Not really. Officers who moonlight to augment their salaries often want to work certain hours to wedge their extra jobs into their days. In addition, working one set shift can radically affect the officers' perspective and knowledge of the streets and the people who are on them. The same individuals walking the sidewalk at 9 a.m. are not necessarily the ones leaning on the street lamp under the full moon.

Kohler says some sleep fall-out on a rotating schedule is inevitable, but exhaustion and its side-effects can be minimized by using a logical progression from days to evenings to nights. This allows the body a more gradual adjustment to the changing hours of wakefulness and sleep and follows the body's own natural preference. "It's much harder to adjust our sleep backwards," he says.

Sliding toward home

When Dan McDevitt, police chief of Lansing, Illinois, was a detective, it wasn't unusual for him to work his side job from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m., then slip into a clean shirt in the morning as he rode to work with his partner. Moonlighting has paid for a lot of second cars, new homes and college educations, while allowing good officers to stay in a profession they love.

When McDevitt first became chief, he was asked if he would be open to changing the rotating schedule. He gave a committee the go-ahead to poll the department's officers and, as a result, the Lansing PD now works three 8 1/2-hour shifts that rotate every month.

McDevitt says the Lansing officers prefer the monthly rotation because it allows them to both moonlight and parent. "When you have small kids and you're working 3 to 11, you're sleeping when they go off to school. Young cops want to spend time with their families," he says.

As for McDevitt, he says the hours and rotations they work are up to the officers. "I would rather empower them … to decide what's best for them and their families. Give people a say in their destiny and I think they're going to do better."

He believes arriving at workable solutions with rotating shifts helps smaller and mid-size departments hold onto their officers. "It's the golden rule of management — push decisions down to the lowest possible level.

"We are hiring the best educated, most intelligent group of cops in history. You get these guys on [the department] after they've jumped through the academic hoops and they have no say. You've got all these smart people here — why not trust their judgment?" McDevitt asks.

We are family

Vincent Henry, associate professor and director of the Homeland Security Management Institute of Long Island University retired from the New York City Police Department after a 21-year career. Henry says the NYPD, as part of a failed attempt to move into a community policing model, went to steady shifts with set days off. The results were not what they'd hoped.

Instead of coming in contact with many officers during the course of rotating shifts, personnel worked only with those who had the same hours. "Officers also were not aware of crime and quality of life conditions occurring on other shifts, and many missed the variety of experience that may have attracted them to police work in the first place," Henry says.

A series of focus groups later determined that officers "missed the camaraderie and the diversity of rotating shifts," Henry says.

Because police agencies work around the clock, shifts are not only necessary, but vital. But it's not necessarily the shifts the officers dislike. The devil is in the details — how the shifts are configured.

"It's unfortunate … many of the executives who determine their agency's shift-work policies do not work the same rotating shifts their officers do," he says. He believes increased familiarity among the higher-ups would breed better understanding.

Henry points to what sleep deprivation can do to both officers and supervisors by using an extreme — but familiar — example. When the World Trade Centers in New York were destroyed by terrorists' attacks, police immediately moved to 12-hour around-the-clock shifts. Many stayed well beyond their allotted work hours to help, often catching cat naps to keep them going. Due to the physical demands of the task, as well as the immense emotional stress and grief facing those at Ground Zero, "many of us literally fell asleep standing," Henry says. Describing the emotionally and physically drained officers on the scene as "zombies," he adds, "Operational capabilities and the quality of decision-making fell off sharply."

The officers who worked at Ground Zero during the weeks following 9/11 faced extraordinary circumstances compacted into a short period of time. While it's obviously not the exact same thing, shift work, when improperly configured, can have the same effect over a longer time frame as the effects of too little sleep continue to build. It may look good at first, but like a layer cake stacked too high, at some point it's going to turn into a mess.

Just the facts

For those who suffer from sleep disorders or work shifts that result in erratic sleep, a full eight hours of shut eye is the Holy Grail and the Fountain of Youth — all rolled into one.

Police officers who work shifts that cycle rapidly have tried all sorts of ways to get the sleep they need, even downing a couple of beers before climbing into bed in the morning. Dr. Nancy Collop, associate professor of medicine and medical director at John Hopkins Hospital Sleep Disorders Center Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, says adults generally require seven to eight hours of sleep in each 24-hour period. A small percentage of the population may require a bit more or less. How much sleep does an individual require? No complicated scientific tests needed. It's simple to determine the amount of sleep necessary, according to Collop.

"The … sleep you need is defined by the amount that allows you to not be sleepy," Collop says. It's also enough to enable someone to perform his or her job successfully.

In lab experiments, rats continuously denied sleep died within 48 to 72 hours. When police officers are not allowed sufficient sleep, they can suffer from impairments that can cost them their lives, ranging from short-term memory loss to reduced reaction times.

Shift workers, particularly those with irregular hours, are predisposed to sleep disorders. Not a big surprise there, but what's amazing is the level of impairment related to going without sleep: an officer who has worked 17 to 19 hours has the reaction time of someone with a BAC of .05 (or, as Vila says, about the equivalent of three shots of Wild Turkey). Jack that time up to 24 hours and the officer's debility is the equivalent of a .10 BAC.

Law enforcement executives who want to get a better grip on the practice of putting sleep-deprived officers on the road have a number of choices. Closely monitoring moonlighting hours helps. And Vila says that, in addition to changing the rotation pattern, compressed shifts also reduce tiredness. Ten- to 12-hour shifts followed by several days off allows officers time to readjust their body clocks.

In the meantime, research into broken and fragmented sleep may one day yield a safe, long-term pharmaceutical solution. Until that happens, police have no choice but to watch each other's backs — as usual.

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