In Motion: Bryan Vila takes it from streets, into lab, and back again

A teenaged Marine on the battlefields of Vietnam, a young street cop in the slums of Los Angeles, and a police chief in the dubious island paradise of Micronesia, now a professor, researcher, and innovator in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Bryan Vila draws on his unique background to inform and enrich his ground-breaking work.

As a senior researcher in the Sleep and Performance Research Center and director of the one-of-a-kind Simulated Hazardous Operational Task Laboratory, both at WSU Spokane, Vila examines what he calls “the intersection of justice and human performance.” His studies of the impact of shift work and sleep deprivation on the performance of experienced police officers translate directly to military fighters and peacekeepers who face similar physiological and cognitive challenges.

“Traditionally, criminology and criminal justice have ignored the impact of human biology on how people make decisions and act on them—what can and can’t reasonably be required of them,” Vila said.

“For example, police officers often are required to work long, erratic hours that research tells us will impair their ability to drive, make decisions, or interact with people. Then we hold them accountable for performing at a high level while operating an emergency vehicle festooned with more gadgets than a person can safely manage while driving; or making decisions in ambiguous, potentially deadly, split-second encounters when their body is flooded with adrenaline or exhausted by sleep deprivation.”

Vila was recently invited to present at a White House innovation conference about a new computer application he helped design for reducing fatigue and improving police officer safety. His team of collaborators from inside and outside the University developed an app that can monitor objective assessments of police officers’ fatigue rather than depending on self-assessments. The tool is equipped to push a warning to the officer and display a list of appropriate countermeasures.

The earlier-detection capability is especially important because people are poor judges of their own sleep impairment, Vila said. “They tend to be seriously impaired by the time they actually feel drowsy, and fatigue countermeasures require time to take effect. The app gives them warnings early enough to take effective action.”

The invention “has the potential to revolutionize how a critical public service is managed,” said Brian Kraft, director of CAS Business Development. “It serves to both enhance effectiveness of personnel and reduce costly, and potentially lethal, fatigue-related risks. It’s a real win-win for both the officers and the public.”

Several of Vila’s upcoming research projects involve testing the impact of the app on police performance in the real world and devising comprehensive fatigue management programs to keep officers and the communities they serve safer.

“I’m driven to do this work because it fills some obviously serious public policy gaps that lead to tragedy, pain, suffering, and injustice,” Vila said. “The primary reason these gaps persist is that science and our institutions tend to have rigid boundaries that keep researchers and policymakers from thinking holistically and systematically about important problems. My research has its roots in the social and behavioral sciences, human biology, neuroscience, medicine, public health, ecology, and politics. Sometimes we find ways to improve society, sometimes we find new basic research that needs doing. Every day I get up with a head full of science—how cool is that!”

Before he became an academic, Vila served in the U.S. Marines and as a law enforcement officer for 17 years, including nine years as a street cop and supervisor with the LA County Sheriff’s Department. He later served six years as a police chief helping the emerging nations of Micronesia develop innovative law enforcement strategies, and two years in Washington, D.C., as a federal law enforcement officer. The various missteps, and canny saves, that Vila experienced as a young Marine and later as a cop in hazardous places inform his current studies of factors that lead to deadly errors.

He recently addressed WSU audiences about the Common Reading subject “Being Wrong ” by revealing his hard-won strategies for embracing error as inevitable, learning to recover with good humor, and wringing good lessons from bad times.

“His story plays out like a thriller novel,” said Karen Weathermon, co-director of the reading program.

Vila teaches courses in criminology, policing, human ecology, capital punishment, crime control research methods, and justice and human performance. He earned his doctoral degree in ecology in 1990 from the University of California-Davis, and has held tenured teaching positions at UC-Irvine and the University of Wyoming. Before joining WSU in 2005, he directed the Division of Crime Control and Prevention Research at the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice.

Vila has served as PI or co-PI on $7.6 million in externally funded research projects, and has brought eight grants/contracts totaling $5.5 million to WSU in the past six years. Law enforcement agencies and occupational health groups around the world have sought him out to speak about the effects of fatigue and sleep deprivation on critical job-task performance.

With numerous publications focused on fatigued law enforcement agents and many other criminal justice topics, Vila was honored with the college’s Career Achievement in Scholarship Award in 2012.