Tired cops, justice and injustice | Bryan Vila | TEDxSpokane

so we have big problems with American police if you've been paying attention to the news the last month or so it's pretty obvious and it's something that recurs over and over and over again the people who really study this problem the deepest and the people who run police agencies are very much convinced that there are three really big problems facing them and they're their was their their main focus right now one of them is budgets police departments across the country all 18,000 of them are grossly understaffed because of the recession a lot of them have had 25% 30% even 50% of their staff cut so that's the first one that's budgets another major problem that policing is stuck with right now is it the public doesn't trust them they don't perceive them very well and they don't think they get justice from the police or even civility oftentimes okay and then the third one and this is a new one because people haven't paid much attention to this in the past is officer safety and health and wellness all right so we've got those three they're focused on them they're big initiatives underway to try and ameliorate those problems but there's a fourth problem that connects to each of those three that if we don't deal with it we'll never deal fully with all three of those problems and it's been ignored for a very long time and I'm not going to tell you what it's no I am and that's police fatigue we normally think about this it's just part of the background that's the way cops are you see them that way in the movies you see them that way on TV but it's not natural I'll tell you why okay and make sure I've not forgotten anything in all of this all right so the other thing I want to get across to you that I think is terribly important is if we're gonna deal with these big problems and the big problem of fatigue that affects each of them you don't necessarily need a whole big new bureaucracy you don't need a big program you don't need all kinds of brand-new things we really know how to deal with these problems now we need to deal with them on a local level because each of those 18,000 police agencies has its own ecology each of your communities has different rhythms and ways of doing things it needs right so we just need things make sense our relatively thrifty and that work locally where policing is done so let's think about who cops are for a second 24/7 these are the folks who run toward danger instead of away from it like somebody with some common sense would do right they wrestled drunks they deal with injured children they give you a ticket every now and again we hire them we empower them to make arrests to stop people and challenge them we obligate them we require them to use force if necessary to enforce the law protect people and then the other thing that we have to do because when you give somebody this much power when you delegate that to them if you want to retain your freedom you also have to hold them accountable for what they do right you have to hold them accountable for their actions so that's how you maintain justice in the community let's look at the flipside of that for a second though what about justice in the workplace these people the cops are our employees we're obligated to provide them with a safe and healthy work environment as much as we can we need to give them the tools and the training to do their job properly and when we do hold them accountable for what they do we need to give them what's called due process of law we have to treat them justly and according to the rules okay so that's how we normally think about this and that should be the end of this paragraph except it's not because there's one more piece that people often forget and that's this basic idea that if you're going to hold someone accountable if you're going to say you must do this then you have to be able they have to be able to do it right it's it's just it's unjust if you're expecting things from people that they can't do all right so we've had research on justice and police performance and if I work for the last 25 years since I stopped being a cop in midlife and went back to get a PhD I've worked at this intersection of justice and human performance the place where we try and look at what's possible for people to really do so justice can be there and I'm going to give you a couple of quick examples of well you'll see what they are of so you often and I've heard it several times now these last weeks over the Ferguson case in a case similar case in st. Louis why can't you just shoot the gun out of his hand why did the cops have to kill him that's a reasonable thing to ask even the bad guys are somebody's son or brother or sister or mother but the problem is with that I mean we could we could pass laws that say cops must do their very best to shoot the gun out of someone's hand but I've got some bad news for you it's not like on TV or in the movies where you know Bruce Willis can do that in a second right well the limits of human performance mean that you can't always hit someone that accurately especially when you're ducking and diving and trying to figure out what the hell's going on in a fraction of a second often trying to employ this prompt this weapon and you've got to make a decision now not later when you've got enough information you have to choose and do something and so in that setting handguns aren't very accurate and handguns themselves that tool we give them also aren't accurate enough there are too many movable joints here right in between that weapon and the target so that's one this is a hypothetical situation but it's asked all the time people have expectations that the police will use a minimum level of force but their expectations of what minimum is often are outside the bounds of reality let me give you a more practical everyday thing that you may not be thinking about this is a modern police car isn't it wonderful we have a laptop we have multiple radios we have radar guns we have GPS with cell phones all these other devices jammed into the car wherever they won't fall over rather than following any ergonomics or anything like we would with an aircraft for example and we know that distracted distraction affects your driving performance in my lab what we've found is if you put distraction together with being tired you're ten times more likely to have a collision not a good thing right and we recognize that so most states have distracted driving laws but we exempt police and other emergency drivers from those laws because we know it's really not possible to do this safely unfortunately we can't exempt them from the laws of physics and the laws of physics mean that as many cops die every year on the roadway not usually driving an emergency way just doing routine driving lots of those accidents are distracted and you get cases like this one in the corner - 2007 state troopers going a hundred and twenty-six miles an hour talking on a cell phone and had been texting before he crashed well that was stupid but he crashed into two sisters killed both of them so this isn't just a problem of workplace justice what cops do affects safety on the streets so just think about this in a nutshell cops work too much they get too little sleep it's hard working shifts and overtime and going to court during the day to get enough sleep the prevalence of fatigue among police is very very high the majority of police officers if when I ask a crowd how many of you have ever worked more than 24 hours in a day all the hands go up how about 36 a lot of hands go up if you've been awake for 17 hours we know from four good studies now that's about the equivalent of a blood alcohol content of 0.05 which in Europe will get you arrested for drunk driving okay so it's a this has a fundamental effect on your ability to perform as a human being in terms of those three big problems right quick let's flip them on their heads or let's look at community in the first place who is it that connects with you and communicates with you and builds your trust better is it officer friendly who speaks to you kindly and looks you in the eyes does all the things that we do to connect with one another is it officer tired and cranky when I was first starting this line of research and I had a grad student I wanted to involve in it I asked her to do it and she said I explained it to her and she said wait a minute you mean nobody's ever noticed that tired cops get cranky like everybody else but they're cranky people with guns and clubs and no no one had it was anyway so that's the impact of fatigue on public perceptions of the police side of it in terms of officer safety and health over the short term when you're too tired it interferes with your ability to do the basic things we demand of a police officer comfort an injured child go give somebody a ticket turn right around and deal with another complicated situation and then go separate two drunks and a domestic relationship who have been fighting all their lives and do it with finesse being too tired affects all of the things that allow you to do that it also affects your ability to hold your temper to not feel as threatened or more anxious like you do when you're tired compared to when you've got enough rest and that affects your performance in deadly encounters over the long term it also affects your overall health because sleep disruption and not getting enough sleep affects your immune system it suppresses its actions and that means that cops disproportionately get cancers vascular disease metabolic disorders like ogee was talking about a minute ago okay all of these things along with psychological disorders this many cops kill themselves every year as they're killed by both violent crimes and the driving collisions so we've got those three big problems that we deal with and the the basic problem underneath them is that as you work cops harder you wear them out more of them get sick more of them burn out and you have fewer cops to throw at their problems you have so you overwork them some more and that leads to a vicious cycle where you have fewer and fewer people available to do the job and you work them harder and harder and you break them and burn them out Oakland Police Department right now has an absenteeism rate of about 46% think about trying to run a business like that so the good news though if a vicious cycle makes it go this way you can turn that around if you can start making things better and slowing that rate of decline you can create what's called a virtuous cycle and here are six things not all of the things we know now that we can do but these are six things you can do one of them labor and management don't have to bicker over this problem they've both got a stake an executive has to manage risk and an executive has to conserve human capital right and if you're a labor organization and you're not protecting safety and health then you're not doing your job properly just running through these quickly because I'm out of time almost poor sleep screen them for sleep disorders and treat them train them how to sleep better shift work train them how to manage shift work improve your scheduling lower the shift length because the longer you're on duty the more dangerous it is fatigue at work you can wear a little device on your wrist all of my research do that measures exactly how much sleep I've had and I can put that through a mathematical model and I can say this is how tired you are now and that's how tired you'll be tomorrow at this time of day or the next day after that overwork put your staff where they belong staff as well as you can but the last one that understaffing keeps coming up right that's the source of this problem we need four police chiefs all over the country to figure out what the real costs of fatigue and overtime and understaffing are because these cows come out in injuries accidents errors of judgment civil suits also and so once you know that you can go to the City Council or whoever else controls the purse strings and you can say here's the business case for how many people I need do you want to pay the money to the lawyers no offence still the lawyers in the road or do you want to pay it to have enough people on the job straight for it the other thing about this is people sometimes they'll say I can't do all that well you don't have to do all of it you have to start somewhere do what you can implement it evaluate how well it's working refine it gradually spread the things you can do and then repeat you've got to be patient often times change takes a whole career of course 20 years or so big whup so did the highway system so does every jet fighter plane we put together so we can reduce those three problems by managing this overlooked problem that's terribly important we've got the science now we're getting we're gaining the public support and we've got support inside the oregon the policing organizations as well this is something we can do now and if we do it we make each of those three problems better but even more than that we improved justice for all people in the workplace people on the streets in the community thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 38,253

Rating: 4.4383955 out of 5

Keywords: tedx, ted x, Lifestyle, ted talk, Social Justice, English, TEDxTalks, Health, Culture, Urban Planning, tedx talk, Biology, United States, ted talks, ted, tedx talks, Performance, Public Policy, Politics, Life, Criminology

Id: A6eHzjEGQMo

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 10 2014