Officer Fatigue

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Officer fatigue

Officer fatigue can be a quite serious problem for police departments. Excess fatigue will generally reduce alertness, decrease performance and worsen mood. These symptoms can reduce officer's performance and safety with potentially life-threatening effects. Patrol officers are expected to remain alert and able to resolve complex, emotional, and potentially dangerous situations. They are expected to be able to multi-task, as well as stay alert during periods of inaction. These activities can be quite difficult for a fatigued officer to complete (Vila 1996). Community oriented policing efforts can be seriously compromised by officer fatigue with excess officer fatigue harming community-police relations (Vila & Taiji 1999). In several cases, the result of officer fatigue has been fatal both for the officer and for civilians involved in fatigue related incidents (Vila & Kenney 2002).

There is not standardised or regulated method of controlling the time officers spend working as there is for pilots and truck drivers. As such, limited only be department policies, many officers will work enormous amounts of extra hours in overtime or moonlighting. There have been reports of officers in both Florida and Massachusetts working up 3,000 additional hours per year (Vila & Kenney 2002). In a study of the Jacksonville, Florida police department, the majority of officers were found to be moonlighting. Most of these officers moonlighted for ten hour or less per week. A number though worked over sixty additional hours per week, leading to average work weeks exceeding 100 hours. At the time, the department did not any polices restricting moonlighting hours. The then recently elected sheriff, reported planning to change this polic...

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...ict of interest. While less likely to occur, a police officer moonlighting in certain medical fields or in some religious roles could conceivable create similar conflicts.

Moonlighting officers will generally only respond to activity within their employer’s property. Many police state that they would intervene in some crimes such as robberies even if occurred outside their employed area, but said that they would leave most crimes to on-duty officers (Stewart 1985). This creates a situation that is both theoretically problematic and potentially harmful to the agency’s image. To the public, there is no reason why an apparently working officer in uniform should not be responding to ongoing criminal activity. The public sees only an officer not responding to a crime, the fact that they are actually moonlighting at the time and are not on-duty is lost on most people.

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