Asking police officers if they’ve had enough sleep to safely perform their jobs is akin to asking drunks if they are capable of driving.
“People are lousy at self-assessing themselves,” said Bryan Vila, a professor with the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology and the Sleep Performance Research Center at WSU Spokane. “It turns out that the part of the brain affected by fatigue is also the self-assessment part.”
Vila tells officers who are chronically sleep-deprived and don’t get seven to eight hours of sleep each night, “you may be driving your patrol car while just as impaired as the last person you arrested for DUI.”