SPOKANE, Wash. — A research study on police fatigue that starts this summer at the WSU Sleep and Performance Research Center (SPRC) has received a funding boost from the U.S. Department of Defense. A two-year, $244,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research has nearly doubled the funding for and expanded the scope of the study, which will focus on the role of fatigue and distraction in police officer performance.
The grant award follows a contract award from the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), which provides funding for the SPRC to study the role of fatigue and distraction in police officer driving performance, comparing officers working day shifts and night shifts.
The defense funding also will allow the researchers to examine the effects of fatigue on deadly force judgment—decision-making related to firearms use—in potentially threatening circumstances and on reporting and communications tasks. In addition, it expands the number of subjects studied from 46 to 80.
“This will be the first time anyone has simulated a police officer’s whole work environment in a controlled lab setting and looked at what happens when they’re as tired and well-rested as they’re going to be,” said professor of criminal justice Bryan Vila, the principal investigator on the study and a researcher associated with the SPRC.
Local law enforcement officers will serve as subjects for the study, coming into the lab once at the end of a long workweek and a second time at the end of a three-day period off work. Each time, they will complete a series of tasks that measure attention, driving performance, deadly force judgment and decision-making, and critical incident reporting.
Measurement instruments include a highly realistic driving simulator as well as a shooting simulator that displays video scenarios that may or may not require use of deadly force.
Although the study will look at police officers specifically, Vila said the outcomes of the study also will be relevant to military ground troops.
“Much of what soldiers and marines do on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places around the world—counterinsurgency, peacekeeping—is very similar in its challenges to what cops do,” he said.
About the Sleep and Performance Research Center
WSU’s Sleep and Performance Research Center includes a state-of-the-art human sleep research laboratory located on the Riverpoint Campus at WSU Spokane and two world-class basic sleep research laboratories based at WSU Spokane and WSU Pullman. Also affiliated with the center are three basic sleep researchers in the WWAMI medical education program at WSU Spokane. The human sleep research laboratory is funded entirely with extramural grants and contracts, and accommodates carefully controlled experiments to study the effects of sleep and sleep loss on human cognitive functioning. With the recent addition of a critical job task simulation laboratory, the center’s facility in Spokane is the only one of its kind in the world.
About Washington State University Spokane
WSU Spokane is the urban campus of Washington State University, a land-grant research university founded in 1890. WSU is recognized by the Carnegie Foundation as one of just 95 public and private research universities with very high research activity, and U.S. News & World Report ranks it as one of the top public research universities in the nation.
Based on the Riverpoint Campus on the east end of downtown Spokane, WSU Spokane offers advanced studies and research in health sciences and health professions; the design disciplines; education; social and policy sciences; and science and technology.
WSU Spokane is leading the development of the campus as a research-intensive comprehensive academic health science center, which national experts say will have a $2.1 billion impact on the state economy at full build-out. Health disciplines currently represented on campus are medicine; pharmacy; nursing; health policy and administration; and nutrition and exercise physiology, among others.