Chronic Sleep Deprivation and Law Enforcement; A Public Safety Crisis

Hi everybody, thank you so much for tuning into the Policing in America podcast. Today we have a wonderful guest, Professor Lois James out of Washington State University. Professor James and I get into a whole host of topics in policing that revolve around police performance, a little bit unbiased and mostly on sleep and the decline in human performance as it relates to sleep and how that intersects with policing. This was a hour long podcast and I feel like we just scratched the surface so I'm going to be reaching out see if we could do a part two and if you have any questions that you want please email me on the Policing in America website because I can email Professor James. So thank you so much and I hope you enjoy the episode and if you do please subscribe, like it, share it and we'll see you on the next one. Hello everybody and welcome to the Policing in America podcast. I have with me today a very special guest and I'm so excited to be speaking with Professor Lois James who is a Professor out of Washington State University College of Nursing. Professor James focuses a great deal for work on bias, sleep, stress and how all of those characteristics sort of coalesce under the performance during sleep deprivation and in high stress situations. I used a lot of Professor James's work in my own dissertation and became a big fan and just so excited to have you on the show. There's going to be, there's much more that Professor James has done and is doing. I'm going to put a link in the show notes. You can read her entire bio but just in the interest of time I'm going to leave it just at that one. Professor anything you wanted to add? No that sounds great. Thank you. Well thank you so much for being here and I'm going to jump right into it. So a lot of, a lot of conversations I have with officers they get frustrated when it comes to certain police training and especially the bias training. It seems as though we have hit a critical mass on this and I often wonder if we're at the point of diminishing returns because we as a profession have spent billions on training officers on their implicit bias and I don't know if it's yielded any kind of return on investment that is somewhat significant but it, so holding that constant, moving to sleep and sleep deprivation, I don't know if we're spending anything aside from maybe people like myself who know this and try to implement certain ways but certainly nothing on a broad scale and certainly nothing at the federal level like policy-wise. We at every police agency or most the big ones for sure have policies on implicit bias and policies on biased policing or some derivative of with consequences. I don't know many that have policies on sleep, sleep deprivation the way the airline trucking shipping railcar does and I just wanted to get your take on that. Yeah it's absolutely fascinating question and you're right you know the kind of the the fatigue risk management strategies that we see being so kind of prevalent in in some professional groups such as aviation and so on really are I don't want to say in their infancy because there are some departments who've been kind of focused on this for for quite some time but you know it's they're they're few and far between I think that you know what we often see is this battle or this struggle between the idea that we can only focus on one thing right we either focus on what's good for the community or we focus on what's good for the department and for me that's such a misnomer because what's good for the department is good for the community and what's good for the community should be good for the department so you know I mean we know from a great deal of science that well rested officers who are who are in control who are managing their stress who are managing their sleep who are managing burnout and cynicism and so on are going to be much better able to manage their biases right so I mean that kind of training honestly has the potential to be just as beneficial for how officers interact with community members as implicit bias training does and and one of the big problems and just like you said you know I mean so much money goes into this there's really been minimal testing to see how effective any training is and I don't want to just you know so this isn't just an implicit bias training problem it's any police training and and and one of the things that I'm you know that I focus my career on is trying to address that you know developing um developing fatigue management training and then testing it developing implicit bias training and then testing it so here in a little bell I'll certainly share some of the results of of those studies because I think you know there's some there's some there's some promising work coming out of that field and and this is and I'm you are an expert on this and I'm for the listeners I'm going to have links to a lot of these studies that were talking about you have one titled the stability of implicit racial bias in police officers and can you talk a little bit about how sleep sort of interweaves itself into these normal human phenomena of bias yeah absolutely so I'm actually going to take a just a tiny step back um you know for for for listeners who I mean I think most people are kind of familiar with the concept of implicit bias now and what it means but for the most part our implicit biases are kind of largely subconscious or semi-conscious and essentially what they are is a a kind of a fingerprint of of our upbringing of society of our kind of core values and beliefs our family our friends and so on and unfortunately you know it's it's unavoidable everybody has implicit biases of some shape or form just because of the type of society that we have and unfortunately those are often not not exclusively but those are often based around race as race is one of the more kind of prevalent or obvious differences between people right and and implicit bias at its core at its most fundamental core comes from our evolutionary survival tactics right I mean in in the ancestral realm it was extremely beneficial to fear and distrust people who didn't look like you because likely they posed a threat so you know I mean despite the fact that now we live in very kind of multicultural and diverse societies to some degree or other depending on on where you are but um you know it is it is no longer beneficial to fear and distrust people who don't look like you however you know I mean it's it's no longer particularly beneficial to fear some of the predatory animals that that we used to have very good reason to fear and yet most of us if we came face to face with a tarantula are probably going to be be pretty alarmed so um you know unfortunately these are these are deep rooted um um kind of evolutionary phenomena but the way that sleep and stress kind of factors into this you know most of us are actually pretty good at managing our internal processes and controlling our behaviors right and especially officers who receive a great deal of training in terms of how you interact with people in terms of what's professional what's appropriate what's not de-escalation procedural justice implicit bias so on and so forth um when an officer is is not overly stressed and not overly fatigued chances are they're going to be act they're going to be able to access those skills right when they're not when they're under an extreme kind of fight or flight response a sympathetic arousal response and especially if they don't have their resources are depleted because of sleep deprivation and so on they're just going to be less likely to um respond from a cognitive thinking rational place and they're going to be more likely to be reactive and that's what that paper found is that you know under sleep deprivation the ability to kind of manage or override especially anti-black um implicit bias was was reduced so that one of the reasons why I think that you know that that that type of training can be very beneficial for implicit bias so there and there's two things about this that that I'm I'm thinking of and I want to pull on the thread a little so the first is the idea behind the sleep alone so the training is there and and it's almost counter to your your paper talks about how chronic sleep deprivation can take this phenomena and allow us to not control for it or mitigate it or allow it to influence us more than it should and we give that training to officers who are largely sleep deprived because they work at night but then they got to come in during the day for training so how much of that training is actually being absorbed how much of that is hitting long-term memory how much of that is actually hitting a space in the brain that is going to be useful and possibly drawn from later in the in the form of memory and number two we we fail I believe as a profession and I've been doing the last year of my my work in training has been focused on teaching officers to critically think and it's so it is it is very um what's the word it's it's promising to see how officers respond to training when I just give them the basic understandings of kahneman's system one system two processing of the brain and and that's what you're talking about right the system the system two thinking this amygdala like that part of the brain is alert and awake and it's it's basically driving the machine that is the brain and we want them in that system one that prefrontal cortex the the cognitive logical processing is that is that am I explaining that correctly absolutely absolutely and I and I often kind of characterize it as the as the accelerator in the break right you know I mean yes the accelerator is always going to be important but the accelerator absence the break and absence that kind of prefrontal cortex saying you know no it's it's it's not a weapon it's just a wallet right I mean that right that right there is kind of you know why unfortunately um we're in at least partially in the predicament that we're in in terms of some of the distrust in in in the profession and some of the real concerns about kind of abuses of power and so on and so forth and we look at these we look at these these incidents these these kind of catastrophic mistakes and you think how in the world could that possibly happen and and and the and the really kind of scary thing is is is you know it it's very easy to see out again I mean not just you know that doesn't by any mean kind of excuse it but it's very easy to see how this can be explained if somebody is is is no longer you know operating from that prefrontal cortex um the human is always going to be inclined to to to to protect to protect oneself and so on um and it's always going to be implied inclined to you know to push on that accelerator and think with that with that lizard brain right the amygdala right yeah and and that is the difficult thing to have explained to the general population not because they don't understand it I believe they understand it the emotions that are attached to it when they see they being the general public when when you see an incident and there are abuses of power that we're dealing with human beings and there's going to be good human beings and bad human beings so you see one instance that is just you know a terrible incident but then you see others and later from our perspective I I see an incident and I think to myself I wonder how that obviously sleep patterns are and you say that to the general community and they're like what you're saying that they're acting racist because they're tired and you think well that's really boiling it down without getting into any of the nuance then you see other instances and you think okay that's terrible that I don't care how tired you were how much sleep you got that's out of bounds no matter how you slice it yeah but it when you have the videos in that confirm the bias of this idea and professor this is what I'm battling against I I want there to be a federal policy on sleep what why why is it that these other industries have you know you can't drive a truck across state lines for a certain length of time without having rest in between but we're going to give our officers guns metal batons send them into volatile situations think that we talk about de-escalation and procedural justice and all of a sudden that's going to help them navigate it when we're not when they could have three hours of sleep the night before and nobody thinks about it they just say good luck have some coffee put some dip in your mouth and press on yeah and expect them not to make mistakes and I mean the community is is right to expect officers not to make mistakes you know I mean it's in it's it's it's really important you know this is an incredibly responsible job right I mean eliminating mistakes is is the goal and that's what we're we're all kind of trying to do but to answer your question I think you know part of it unfortunately is you know I think we're facing a crisis of understaffing you know a crisis of recruitment of retention and and from the policing perspective I understand why it's not it's it's it's not as rewarding as it was you know I mean it's not as popular as it was it's it's it's really really problematic to expect fewer officers to do the same or more and hold them accountable to those same standards and you know and and and continue to expect perfection which of course is is is is probably unrealistic but you know that's that's the goal and that's what we're striving towards because these are these are you know these are lives that we're that we're talking about and and errors it's not just it's not just an error in judgment it can be you know catastrophic and loss of life and ripple through you know families and communities and and then you know continue to erode public trust and policing and affect the police profession further so you know I mean I certainly don't want to sound doom and gloom but until we can really get a handle on on some of the staffing issues this is going to continue to be very very very difficult problem to solve well and and your your husband had a great line in the podcast that you both run in the freaking omics episode where he said do you work in a profession where 85 percent is is is good enough you know and and clearly most professions 85 percent is not good if if your amazon delivery truck driver is getting it right 85 percent of the time it's not good but at the at the worst it's annoying and and it's frustrating if officers are getting it right 85 percent of the time it's it's truly catastrophic because when you look at these big numbers these tens of millions of interactions and the low occurrences of force you are now getting into single percentages and even when you're getting it right 98 percent of the time you see even what one two percent can be and then you get into shootings right and now you're talking fractions of a percentage but the the appetite and the tolerance from the community is very low even for that they want near perfection yeah yeah because i mean of course for that for that family it doesn't matter it doesn't matter how infrequent it is you know in the in the grand scheme of things it's it's no less devastating so so no i mean i i do i do understand and empathize with that and i and i completely agree with steve you know i mean policing is a is a 100 profession it's one of those it's one of those professions that officers you know we need to strive for perfection all the time i mean we that's just that's just a reality of it and and um and you know and i know that might seem unfair but it is one of those jobs that mistakes are just you know they're so enormous they're so potentially enormous so it's it's it's the representation of a government a government that's you know we are the police are the most visible form of this and and we have guns on our hips you know and there's that tacit that's subliminal authority that's subliminal power structure no matter where you go you have a gun on you to enforce laws and so i i didn't understand that before i got more educated on these things and now i understand even the implicit and explicit you know projection the image and the impression now something i you touched on this with the staffing this was an issue in 2019 when i was doing my my doctoral work and now it's only got more so i thought this was bad in 2019 before everything kind of went off the rails but but let's just hold for that moment prior to that so the 2019 i came across someone i found to be incredibly profess impactful who's been talking about this for decades and maybe even perhaps a mentor of yours is it brian villa byla yes byline absolutely adore him yeah okay a wonderful person you know wrote the book tired cops like it's it literally and and the studies want my dissertation committee when i was going to my process they said we notice you have this name an awful lot you know so brian villa i'm sorry you said villa byla byla like violet brian byla so brian and then you know professor dinges and they're like we notice these names are there and i said yes because these are the two people that have done the most work you know you have somebody who wrote a book called tire cops you have somebody who coined the phrase power nap like if you're going to do a study these are the two names you want attached and and they're you know he has a ted talk on this why is it that someone by that has done so much good work and hey he's been on a ted stage why is it that it hasn't gotten the attention of academia the way i think it should why why do we not have the kennedy school in harvard you know they they they talk a little bit about it but there's no push for this when i was promoting it i remember my committee said so what you're trying to tell me is you're gonna write a paper on trying to justify racist behavior because cops don't get enough sleep and they just you know these are academics these are smart people but because of the media narrative or the lack of good information this is not like a thing why why is that and i i have so much difficulty in what you just said just triggered something in me with this this kind of fundamental misunderstanding that people have between justification and explanation you know i mean we want to know what the causes are of bad behavior and mistakes right we want to know that we want to know why is it that sometimes officers go off the rails either you know apparently intentionally or not in order to be able to address it and fix it that does not mean we're trying to justify why mistakes are made you know i mean for me there's a kind of real fundamental difference you know i mean when i when i when i see you know even the the kind of the you know really really catastrophic mistakes that are very very public and so on i always want to know you know what shift was the officer working you know how how little sleep were they were they operating under i don't want to know that because i'm trying to excuse it i'm trying to know it to try and you know to try and prevent it from happening again so you know i i just i find that so interesting and i think that that is a kind of a fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of people have so you're you your your husband's work and you know professor brian's work it's professor dinges all these great minds are together you're running labs you're doing real data real tests and i still can't seem to convince people that this is an issue like i don't even get a seat at the table to talk about this even in our own force investigations that we do in policing even at like the cop level and so i wanted to talk a little bit about like police culture yes yeah part of it a stigma for sure part of it a stigma aren't we maybe getting in our own way sometimes as a profession absolutely you know i mean it is there's there's definitely still just you know i mean mental health generally it's it's becoming more acceptable to talk about it in policing it's becoming more acceptable to talk about you know the rampant rates of suicide and and and mental health concerns and sleep deprivation and so on but there's still this underlying kind of perception or or or belief that if you sign up for this job you need to be able to just suck it up you know that it's a difficult job it's going to be stressful you're going to work shifts you're going to be tired you're going to have to figure all that out right and and that's really not the case i mean yes it is the case that it's stressful and that you'll have to work shifts and and so on but it's not the case that there aren't resources out there that can help you know and we see this devastating trend of officers retiring and then dying not long after you know kind of seven years or so later and that is this kind of long-term accumulation of chronic sleep deprivation and chronic stress that increases the risk of you know pretty much every major disease and and and shortens lifespan so you know when i when i hear officers kind of saying well it's just in reality the job and that's just you know what i'm going to have to do it's not it's not everybody can you know any officer even with overtime even with you know even with extended shifts and so on it is possible to get sufficient sleep right if it's not then that's that that's essentially illegal right i mean a department cannot not allow an officer to get sufficient sleep between shifts right they cannot they cannot force somebody to work to that extent so if an officer at that point is taking on so much overtime then they are prioritizing not getting enough sleep and this is where it is where i can be not overly popular because i'll talk to officers about this and they'll say you know but oh my you know especially coming up to retirement you know my my pension is going to be based on that and it's like okay but you're going to have barely any time to do anything with it and what's your quality of life going to look like so at some point you need to rethink some of these priorities and realize that if you don't get sufficient sleep you know nothing else is going to work and so i've started implementing this training at the the the ground level i i teach the youngest officers because when you were young on the job you were incentivized it was a badge of honor to work overnight till say seven in the morning to get lucky enough to have a court case that starts at 8 30 because that's all overtime for you and if that court case went till noon two three o'clock you're not sleeping you're you're just sitting around waiting and now it's you got about maybe five hours left between the time the court ends and your next shift begins and you take a nap in your car in the parking lot or you go to the courtroom and you get a few winks and now you're awake and you're almost it's almost like you're bragging like oh i've made this much in overtime i just turned in a six hour overtime report and and the culture was that that's good what i'm trying to teach officers is you're paying for this there's there's the 55 60 year old of you is out there on a timeline and you're going to meet that person and when you do you don't want to meet them and they have three years of life left they have diabetes the onset of dementia or some cognitive impairment and all that work will be for nothing but it it's hard for that young brain to see that far away yeah yeah absolutely absolutely so with that let's so that's a systemic problem i hear systemic problems in policing and i look at it from a different perspective that's a systemic problem the fact that if i saw three officers do two shots of whiskey right before they went out on patrol i would have a moral and legal imperative to stop them and say no you're not allowed but if those same officers all said we got three hours of sleep last night and we're going out of control i have i have no imperative furthermore i have no incentive to to stop them i just have to hope for the best yeah yeah and i do i do believe that you know just like what 56 50 or 60 years ago i mean that your example of somebody kind of taking a couple shots having a few beers and coming to work i mean that was maybe not the norm but certainly not all that frowned upon right so i mean i i do think that we will get to a point in society you know we'll get to a point with policing where you know fatigue and sleep deprivation will follow in the same way and i'm really hopeful hopefully not 50 or 60 years from now that people will look back and they'll be like you could be awake for you know 24 more hours essentially you know if you were blowing the equivalent of a point one and then weapons up and out you go you know so i do think we'll get to a point where people will look back and have the same kind of are you crazy mentality that we have about drinking on the job now before the yes so a few questions that i have it just for like the the straightforward answer we can now say without a doubt and it this is a hard bar to hit but sleep deprivation causes cognitive impairment not correlated it causes can we make that claim yes we can yes okay so we can now make that claim number two do we know this is from Matthew a lot of Matthew Walker's work we know that we have the morning lark and the night owl and these things do you ever see a space where we can test for that and then say look you're predisposed for this you will actually do well as a night owl and then we start measuring people's their their bio rhythms their circadian bio rhythms and maybe align them towards that part of the of the those shift workers do you ever see a space for that oh absolutely absolutely and the departments that i do work with in terms of fatigue risk management strategies that's one kind of the various points that i always try and hit one is on duty napping which is often met you know people are absolutely appalled by the idea that i'm a huge advocate and champion of on duty napping i'll come back to that but the other is matching workers to shift so it's exactly what you're talking about you know and and it's and it's hard to get past the you know bidding by seniority which is which is how it's you know it's always done right you know and and i get it i get that you know you've you've been there for a while you've paid your dues you should get to pick the shift that you want but i do also think that you know kind of educating officers about what their you know their their natural kind of morningness and eveningness looks like and how they'll do on the various shifts can definitely inform part of that policy so i work with departments and it's very straightforward there's a morningness eveningness questionnaire that you can download freely online and that will tell you enough you know i mean there's really no additional measurement needed right i mean it's super straightforward and and you know we just have all the officers in the department take this this little quick questionnaire and and just kind of let them you know it can just help in the in the process of their selection because they're going there are going to be some officers who actually find days harder than nights especially if they're having to get up at five a.m. and they're extremely you know they're extreme evening types yeah i that was an interesting point that that your your husband talked about is there are people who will feel the same cognitive impairment if you get them up too early like they're their natural rhythm doesn't necessarily align with the rising and setting of the sun yeah exactly no there are some people who do who do really well on nights and for those what i what i tend to kind of focus on in terms of education is you know just because you feel well or better on shift than others might doesn't mean you you don't need to kind of focus on still getting enough sleep right so so with them then it's you know all about split sleep schedules because for for most people it's going to be impossible for on night shift to get enough consolidated sleep in one block so we tend to kind of try and get people to you know come off nights as as quickly as feasible get to get to bed get to sleep you know all that great stuff with sleep hygiene block out light block out sound have the bed you know the bedroom space nice and cold and get as much sleep as you can which for most is not going to be more than about four or five hours that is not enough right i know a lot of people are going to be listening to this being like i'm lucky if i get that but it is not enough to prevent long-term sleep restriction that like i said kind of adds to your risk of disease and so on and so forth so it's really important to get that additional kind of hour or two before you get before you go out again on shift so this is a question i get asked a lot and i'm looking for the definitive answer well yeah i work my 312 or my 410 but i catch up on sleep on the weekends i catch up and from what i've looked at there is no catching up can you explain a little bit of that why there there is no catching up per se yeah yeah and it's kind of an interesting one because there there isn't there isn't so i mean we we you know sleep desk can certainly be paid back but you know i mean to use your example if somebody's working their 312s and for whatever reason they're getting kind of three maybe four hours sleep and that's it across that you know 78 hour period then even kind of what we call a saturation sleep so you kind of yeah you get off and you and you sleep and even if you can you know sleep like 12 13 14 hours which some people can it's going to um it's going to bring you back to about 80 percent right so i mean not not horrible but like like like we're consistently saying policing is not an 80 percent profession you know yeah it's going to make you it's probably going to make you safe ish right but it's not going to um it's not going to be beneficial in terms of preventing your risk for for problems down the road and so on and so forth so it's better to try and prevent that need that you know better to not let that sleep debt build up to that extreme extent um but you know i mean somebody working nights is unlikely to get eight hours of sleep right per you know per 24 hour period i mean that that's that's that's it's it's possible but i mean you're really having to work on it and not doing much else in between right so um so you know so so i don't you know i don't want people to get too caught up in the idea of like oh god you know i really i can't top up or pay back at all you can just try not to get to that extreme fatigued state so and i explain it like this and i have an expert so i want to see if this is a decent analogy so the way i explain it is sure we could get you back to baseline right if you've been up for 24 hours you're going to need some sleep and when you wake up you're going to feel better than you were when you went to sleep you know eight hours ago or six hours ago but i i explain it like this if you flex a muscle or if you're working out you have a byproduct and that byproduct tends to be lactic acid the muscle burns you need to stop recover okay the brain has a metabolic byproduct as well just like lactic acid needs to be flushed out the brain has sort of plaque and debris that that is a byproduct of processing now if you miss sleep or if you fail to get enough sleep that byproduct doesn't get washed away and so what ends up happening is you do that for two or three days now that byproduct that plaque you don't it doesn't all get cleaned off it's like brushing your teeth right so i brush my teeth but if i skip and i skip it's okay because every six months i go to the dentist they take a metal tool and they scrape off the plaque well when you miss your sleep those that metabolic byproduct wedges in there and that's what we see helps accelerate you know the the the cognitive impairment oh yeah so that's how i explain to you may feel better but just understand like that's a debt that will be paid because you can't catch up it's not like you could sleep for 12 hours and the adenosine gets come out and it washes everything away now it's nice and clean you miss the opportunity to get that byproduct when you could and now it's it's lodging in there is that reasonable oh absolutely and that's where we see the connection between chronic sleep restriction and um and Alzheimer's for example you know so i mean you're absolutely right you know i mean it's it's it's really you know it's it's not just it's not just cardiovascular disease it's not just metabolic and we always used to think along those lines when we when we thought about sleep restriction and you know kind of what weight and diabetes and so on and risk of heart attack it's not just those it's also things like like Alzheimer's it's increased risk of of all the the mental health concerns you know i mean obviously increased risk of all the sleep disorders you know which are which are fairly um you know fairly prevalent in in this professional group so you know i mean yeah you're absolutely right we need to be we need to be we need to be mindful and we need to be educating officers about what those risks are because it has to factor in to their decision-making process about um prioritizing this and and sleep at least has to be considered in that equation and often you know historically it wasn't it was one of those things like oh i'll sleep when i'm dead and the the skeptic in me is like okay well that won't be very long so that's that's not too far in the future if you if you continue down this path there's 100 percent absolutely so what about the officer who says i feel fine i do good you know matthew walker said if you took the general population and rounded up to the the the next number the next whole number of people who can operate on five or less hours of sleep the number would be zero like this is how rare this number is but you have officers who feel because it's very difficult to measure that cognitive impairment because they feel alert and they say no i'm fine i could go on five hours sleep i got my bang i got my coffee i got my whatever monster how do you reach them to say well i know you feel well or is there a test i could give them to show that their cognitive impairment is is actually there yeah well there are there are several tests but but you know to answer the first part i think that um i think that oftentimes officers are just accustomed they're they're used to feeling that way right so they they mistake it as being normal right they consider it their normal i can't tell you the number of times that i've done surveys and seen you know these astronomically high rates of of anxiety and depression and PTSD and so on and then you kind of look at ratings of quality of life and it's like oh yeah you're pretty good and it's and it's like how how is that you know that you think that that's normal that you think that that's okay and it's and it's just again it's just kind of one of these these um cultural expectations that it's just yeah it's a tough job suck it up you're you know if you don't if you're not okay with it find something else to do um and and that's just that's just such a damaging attitude because it should we shouldn't see these rates right i mean yes policing is always going to be a stressful job that's why stress management is so important you know yes we're always going to have shifts that's why fatigue management is so important so yeah no i think that that's kind of a really really important um a thing to remember is that you know just because just because you're used to something doesn't mean that it's the way that things should be right i wrote it down because i'm going to say that in the training the tolerance is not a sign of health i know just being able to tolerate something is not a sign of health so the idea of the REM sleep and the N REM sleep as i understand it that deep REM sleep this is where officer people in general can regulate emotions these these hard emotions these memories that are there and when officers get that light sleep and they don't get into the deep sleep so maybe they slept for five hours but they never access that REM deep sleep they're not helping themselves sort of sort of shave down that those stressful encounters that and then they get this hypervigilance because they're they're it's almost like a ptsd is that is that am i trending in the right way when i think about that yeah so you know when we think about sleep and obviously you know our sleep um we kind of cycle through these different phases which is which is which is what you're saying i know um and you know we go from kind of light sleep the kind of the alpha theta and then we go down from there into into delta which is that that deep sleep and then from there we kind of transition to um to REM to rapid eye movement kind of dream sleep and then back up into light sleep and so that cycle continues and the way that it that it typically works is um you know that the first part of our sleep period we spend more time in in delta which is that kind of that but really really deep sleep right and less time in in REM and then as the night goes on and that kind of core sleep is mesh we spend more more time in REM now there's still a great deal about sleep that we don't know but the major theories are that you know the the kind of the the delta that deep sleep is what we need for um for kind of restoration right you know that's that's that's really really important for the body right REM that that dream sleep is um kind of that memory consolidation piece so really really important for the kind of more the mental right really important for the brain so um you know when we take somebody for example who who struggles with some PTSD symptomology with some some hypervigilance it can be really difficult for them to to um to get that that delta right you know because they they have difficulty relaxing enough so they're kind of bouncing between they're bouncing between light sleep and dream sleep which is you know problematic obviously with nightmares and so on but they're not really getting enough of that um of that deep delta core restorative sleep so um so yes I mean and that's that's not to indicate that REM sleep isn't important of course it is it's critically important but they're you know anecdotally at least the issue that we seem to see most with officers is um you know not getting enough of of delta of that core sleep and then you get this self-fulfilling self-perpetuating negative like cascade because you can't get into the delta because you have the the stress and the anxiety and there's oh you can't get deep in there to start managing and mitigating and and maybe shaving off the edges of that anxiety and and then it just perpetuates and then they don't get sleep and then they're slightly cognitive impaired and then they're thrown into another tense situation and you can see this like now that I've done a little bit more work with like the neuroscience of the brain you can see when people are in these states an example drop the knife repeated 30 40 times in a row yeah you know you could see like okay I now know your prefrontal cortex is not engaged your amygdala is running the show and and I'm I'm not I'm as a citizen I'm expecting you to do this but as the officer the option to change course isn't even coming into their consciousness yeah exactly right they're not even thinking of a better option but but now seeing the video we're judging them by saying and I'm not trying to make excuses but I'm just trying to paint the picture we're judging them by saying well why didn't you just do this and the answer is because that thought never even occurred yeah yeah right and and so it does does stress inoculation training actually work there's there's very unfortunately it's very little evidence to show that it does and and and there's actually you know there's some evidence to show that it's problematic right detrimental it's one of those things I mean it's one of those things like I mean the idea behind it it makes sense right I mean you know things are going to be stressful so let's put officers in really really stressful situation and I mean to an extent you know with simulation training and whatnot um you know it's important that it be realistic don't get me wrong you know I mean you want it to be realistic you want it to evoke you know the emotion some of the emotions because you want to be able to practice under those kind of conditions but unfortunately what a lot of trainers do is they kind of they they take that you know they they go from there to thinking oh well you know I'm gonna run an officer you know till they're exhausted and then make them do this and make them do that and I'm gonna you know not so much in in policing as as in the military but you know we're gonna we're just gonna keep people up for however many days and then make them do this and there's very little to show that that's beneficial right yeah and yet it's accepted it's accepted practice that I'm gonna treat an officer sort of I don't know like without dignity of the academy we're gonna hammer them on the most minor thing because if they can't take the abuse in the academy they're not gonna take it in the field yeah and I think how about we model the behavior and we say here's how you de-escalate well you made an honest mistake and you forgot your book or you didn't shave all the way let's talk you through this so that when the officer goes to the field the the very first knowledge they have of policing is yelling and ordering people and maybe they get so I know how to mitigate this but it's like we can't break the tradition and the culture that we're because in order to get more sleep on in this profession we're going to have to break some cultural norms like take them off the grid completely oh yeah and I think you know one of the and again this is a little bit of a controversial one but one of the things that we see not in all academies but in in in in most is this extreme emphasis on officer safety first and and don't get me wrong I'm not saying that that's that's you know obviously officer safety is critical but you cannot expect a young recruit to take in a lesson on de-escalation when the first part of that lesson is continually showing them videos of officers being assaulted right and that is still a fairly commonplace in the academy right you know I mean it's like okay yeah we're gonna talk about de-escalation but know that if it really goes down it's unimportant right I mean it sounds like that's then it's not a skill then it's not a core skill that you're actually teaching I mean there has to be a way of teaching effective communication de-escalation procedural justice and so on without sacrificing obviously safety and you know I mean we we we always need to have officers be aware of their surroundings and so on and so forth but this kind of continual message that okay well when things are going right that's when things like de-escalation and and implicit bias and procedural justice are important those soft skills right when they're important and when things are going wrong the only thing that matters is that you win right I would say I would say that during those times when you know things are hitting the fan right those are the times when it is the most important to remember those lessons right because 100% those lessons are going to keep you in control yeah so um you know yeah that is an I've been trying to weave this in because you hear soft skills hard skills kinder gentler and what I've been trying to say is no more is there a time for procedural justice and when your gun is pointing at somebody because the risk is so high right now on both sides of this and you need to keep that brain functioning so procedural justice yeah we we we couch it as a soft skill but just as you eloquently said it is as it is the foundation of the hard skills because if we're just acting on pure emotion all the time well good luck we're now just we're now rolling the dice and hoping it turns out one of the very best examples of of de-escalation and procedural justice and and so on that I've that I've ever seen was from a a video of a of an officer involved shooting and unfortunately it really was the only option available to the officer this this this guy terribly sad you know kind of meant some significant mental health issues um but was um kind of very very close to his family with it with a knife and I mean it just was there was no other option you know I mean there was there was a very valiant attempt at trying to find another alternative but it didn't it didn't work out and the example of de-escalation that I thought was so powerful was after the after the officer had had shot the suspect went over obviously removed the knife and the interaction that this officer had with that person then was very very powerful and recorded via via body camera and um you know it was just this officer kind of saying you know what's what's your name tell me about your you know tell me about your your family you know they they really they really want to see you you know we're going to make it through this obviously while rendering aid and and so on and this um this this gentleman survived and and um and that video was actually very beneficial for police community relations despite the fact that you know potentially lethal force was was engaged so you know I mean oftentimes we kind of think that that de-escalation means exclusively means that force won't be required and sometimes that's not the case it's just you know treating people like like human beings worthy of dignity and respect regardless of circumstances if you can offline if you could send me the link to that I would love to to see that and see if how I can implement it and you're you are 100 correct and you just gave me a new way to think about this which is de-escalations often is often put forth as how to not get into a use of force and why didn't the officer de-escalate but you've just showed an example explain example when deadly force the highest level of force was in fact used but de-escalation was still a part of this through the event you know not just at this moment but then afterwards as well because that's what you see and I think that doesn't win our profession many favors when officers shoot somebody they're on the ground and they they have multiple bullets in them and there's this pause because of officer safety and I can I tell my cops if this person gets up right now and starts walking at you we've got bigger problems like the zombie apocalypse is now happening because clearly they're down yeah four of us can walk up to this person yeah but it is like this this pause and wait and just in case they're faking it or something but but like you say we are it is beaten into the officer's heads that officer safety is is paramount and I would say that there's very little that's more damaging to public perceptions than than seeing somebody who's who's been shot and officers standing around you know and I mean I know that sometimes there there might be a reason for it and so on but the general public's not going to know that you know and any and unfortunately it just looks like well we really we really don't care and and you know again I know that's not the case I know that you know I know that officers by and large you know they are yeah they're empathetic and and and so on and so forth you know I mean for the most part people don't get into this profession unless they do want to help people and and you know serve society so um but yeah I mean the visual piece is unfortunately um all the more important today especially with you know just the knowledge that everything's being recorded whether that's body cam or people's cell phones or cctv or whatever it might be so um public perceptions are very important so professor we we talk a lot about police fatigue police shooting and whatnot but another issue that we have we are overrepresented in traffic fatalities there is a lot of damage done to citizens uh the community at large and officers with traffic fatalities and you could imagine when you're hurling yourself you know at 88 feet a second you know through space and time and you're on three or four hours of sleep .5 seconds is equivalent to 40 50 feet of travel time before you recognize something do you have any research or have you done research on traffic collisions and policing and sleep deprivation yes so Steve's done most of this my my husband he's done some great great work on um drowsy driving distracted driving and most importantly the the interaction between those two right because we know that you know we know we know from a lot of of um of data kind of what the equivalent is in terms of you've been up for however many hours and what that looks like in terms of the equivalency in blood alcohol content um and and we know of course that the distracted driving is bad you know most states i think actually all states have have distracted driving laws most of them if not all of them exempt um emergency vehicle drivers which identify ramen but um but yeah so i mean it's not unusual at all to see officers you know obviously getting getting information from their from their mgt's from their mobile um data terminals whatever whatever that might be um you know potentially from their phones as well as well as they're being expected to to scan for this that and the other and that combination of distraction and um and and fatigue is is really really problematic right so so yeah i mean steve steve's definitely the person to talk to about that he's done great studies he looked at at a decade worth of data from um the entire state of california um in terms of any any officer involved collision that had damage of i think more than five hundred dollars so pretty much all officer involved collisions yeah yeah and and he looked at the at the circumstances of those and um you know i mean for the most part they're they're happening under you know decent light conditions you know no alcohol intoxication thankfully you know i mean no weather issues yeah yeah you know i mean for the most part just one person you know they're not they're not happening in in pursuits and whatnot they're just they're happening because officers are falling asleep at the wheel and driving into a tree or whatever it might be and we don't and this is something that never it seems to get catch and i'll be curious if your husband has the rate of officers driving home from work because now you're off duty and this is something i i i go into a classroom and i say how many of you have ever knotted off driving home you get about 50 percent how many of you ever showed up at home you don't even remember getting off the freeway you usually get everyone's hand those to them yeah right and so you say okay and those of you that didn't raise your hand that didn't knot off it's only because your memory doesn't remember you knotting off yeah because if we had a little camera on your rearview mirror you'd see those microsleeps and you'd see them knotting off for a quarter of a second or you know whatever three tens of a second but it's happening at a crazy rate but i don't think the profession captures that data because well that's off duty but no no exactly right it's because of the duty it's because of what we've put them through i remember what it's like to work a four stay stretch and your overtime every day and you just can't wait to get home and you get home and you don't remember getting there like that can't be a sign of health and safety for the community around me that i don't remember driving home yeah yeah and this is this is you know this is not unique to policing i mean this is shift work generally um the most dangerous time of a shift worker's life even for a profession like policing which is a dangerous profession is that post shift drive home wow you know what that is and we just we just finished a big study with with nurses looking at you know kind of safety risks of working kind of three consecutive 12s and then you know and put them in in one of our driving simulators and have them do a kind of simulated post shift drive home and and and especially for working consecutive nights that that's when you know that's when we see the um those those microsleeps and those uh you know kind of extreme lane deviation those those collision um predictors and when we when we do the you know education around around these these types of issues um one of the things that we talk about is you know well why why is there this apparent kind of comfort level that people have with like you know falling asleep at the wheel and so on and in part unfortunately it's because we get away with it for the most part right you know i mean we we we we wake from that little microsleep and nothing has happened so we just i just need to push through it's just another 10 15 20 whatever it might be minutes to get home yeah but where i always kind of go not to be overly morbid is like well what happens if you have one of those microsleeps at the same minute at the same moment that a dog runs across the road or a kid runs across the road you know i mean can you imagine being in that situation and can you imagine anything that is worth that and and getting home you know is not worth that right you need to just if you're feeling yourself nodding off at the wheel you have got to pull over in a safe space and sleep for 10 minutes right you just have to there's there's no other option because nothing is worth that you're 100 correct and we and the problem too is if you show up to a scene of an accident and they say what happened and and my my driver one says i'm sorry i just i just fell asleep like okay that's an accident but but if i got out there and there was a bottle of alcohol they'd be in handcuffs going to jail yeah but they say well i just fell asleep well maybe we need to have more responsibility as a species yeah as a society to say this is no longer socially acceptable yeah like if you're fatigued but that would again we're gonna break the doors off the culture the american culture of we press on yeah and you know just get two of these as you go right i think we're getting there because it's it's becoming that way more so with the public right i mean we're we're thinking more you know if somebody gets in in an accident you know not not an officer but a member of the general public it's it's now it's kind of one of the things that's considered it kind of drives you driving is becoming more more recognizable so i think that it's that it's starting there i think it will we will get to the point where it infiltrates the emergency services as well yeah and at the very least we're going to create cars that have emergency braking and take us out of it yeah and just do it so i want to be aware of your time i want to be cognizant of that and i'm so appreciative you spent some time with me if you could give some takeaways to maybe the sworn the officers who are listening like we just maybe some little tidbits for them to say look you're working night watch here's some things you absolutely should do to maximize the sleep yeah i think well a couple of things is do please download that morning this evening this questionnaire you know knowing yourself is really important you know having that having that information is is really critical you know whether you i'm not sure how much officers are going to have a say in the shifts that they have or but to the extent that you that you can that's really really useful information if you are assigned tonight's that idea of kind of split sleep is is really important so get off shift try and get as much as you can then get enough you know get a nap before you go back on um it's probably it's too much to get into but if anybody is interested and in terms of you know we like to talk about consistency and sleep schedules which is tricky for night shift workers because obviously you don't want to stay on a nocturnal schedule during your time off but it is possible to do it in a phased way right so you have your your on duty schedule your transition schedule and your off duty schedule and just try and be consistent with that so i do a lot of work with departments around around kind of setting up what that might look like to give people a guideline or some some help um okay and then just in terms of some some some real simple kind of um sleep hygiene that kind of making the best of your of your of your bed space for the for the best possible um sleep opportunity and that really is about um cool dark quiet those are the those are the important things so okay good so i'm on the right path with this and then the last question i i get now i'm gonna leave you with this and before we say goodbye an officer will say if i have enough time to get in a workout or an extra hour of sleep what should i do and i always push for the sleep what would you say yeah i mean i i would i would agree um exercise is a great way of um kind of promoting wakefulness certainly you know so i mean a a quick exercise session um can definitely have a strong alerting factors of course it's raising body temperature and so on um but we do we you know we know that prioritizing exercise oversleep you're actually not going to be getting the benefit from exercise you think you are right so you know we do see people who despite all the exercise despite the good nutrition and so on still struggle with weight and and and whatnot because they're not getting the sleep that they need excellent excellent well i want to be very cognizant of your time and and we're coming up just over an hour so with that i i just want to thank you so so much for spending the time with me and truly it was an honor it's it's like uh it's it's like a sports fan getting to meet the athlete when the academic gets to meet the scholar that they cited in their work so thank you so much oh no thank you this has been this has been fabulous conversation and i really appreciate um you know you reaching out and giving me the the platform absolutely and then maybe if i can't offline i may you could forge your email my email to your husband i'd like to do a little bit more of a drowsy driving absolutely yeah i know he's he's the the the lead um expert in in in police uh drowsy driving for sure excellent well professor thank you so so much for being here and i look forward to future conversations with you absolutely absolutely take care you as well bye bye (soft music)