Ecological and Internal Validity of Predicting Police Officers' Sleep and Fatigue from Work-Rest Schedules

Samantha Marie Riedy

Policing is a 24/7 operation. Police departments use shift work to schedule officers around-the-clock, and understaffed police departments also rely on overtime. In the United States, policies governing officers’ work schedules are set at the local government level. As a result, there is considerable variability in work hour policies from one police department to the next. This variability notwithstanding, long and irregular work hours are prevalent in United States policing. Mitigating and managing fatigue in policing is critical for sustaining around-the-clock performance. In operational settings, biomathematical models of fatigue (BMMF) are often used to ensure workers have adequate sleep opportunities and to predict fatigue likelihood during a work-rest schedule. In operational research, BMMF are a useful tool for assessing the relationships between work-rest schedules, sleep-wake behaviors, on-duty fatigue, and actual job performance. BMMF predict the temporal profiles of fatigue using observed sleep-wake histories (“one-step approach”). In the absence of actual sleep-wake data, sleep-wake histories are first predicted from the work-rest schedules and fatigue is then predicted from the predicted sleep-wake histories (“two-step approach”). This dissertation examined the ecological and internal validity of predicting police officers’ sleep-wake behaviors and fatigue using a BMMF in the absence of actual sleep-wake data. The first two chapters examined the relationships between work-rest schedules, sleep-wake behaviors, on-duty fatigue, and actual job performance as assessed by absenteeism and citizen complaints. The third chapter determined whether sleep predictions from a BMMF parameterized in aviation and rail generalize to policing. The fourth chapter compared rail workers’ actual and predicted sleep-wake behaviors and determined the implications of predicting sleep-wake behavior inaccurately. Shift work, sleep loss, and on-duty fatigue increased the likelihood of absenteeism and citizen complaints suggesting that these factors may be associated with the officer shortage problem and police-community relationships. At the group-level, the sleep predictions generally reflected dayshift and afternoon shift officers’ actual sleep-wake behavior. Consistent across chapters, no daytime sleep was predicted even though it was observed, and this resulted in discrepancies between actual and predicted sleep-wake behaviors. With further development, BMMF provide a potential tool for studying and mitigating police fatigue and the associated consequences.

Ecological and Internal Validity of Predicting Police Officers' Sleep and Fatigue from Work-Rest Schedules

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