DEAR BULLETHEAD:
I am working on a research paper about law enforcement officers being mandated to work over time after working 8, 10 or 12 hours and are mandated to work another whole shift after informing their management team that they are really tired and would fall a sleep as soon as the sat down. Keep in mind that there are other officers that want the over time but are not notified to come in because the management team does not want to do the extra work.
Also How sleep deprivation would effect the officers performance.
Can you give me any imput on this
Thank you in advance.
—Jerome Ellis, Criminal Justice Student
Dear Jerome,
Drop your criminal justice classes and start taking English! Your writing is horrible. Your grammar sucks! Your spelling is weak! And you don’t know the difference between a sentence and a fragment. You didn’t even use the spelling checker provided by your e-mail.
Maybe you’re not familiar with my column, but Ol’ Bullethead loves to kick people in the face! I don’t care if they send good questions. I look for an opening and drop a hard right cross through it as fast as a less lethal round shoots out the barrel of one of those funny-looking pumpkin shotguns. Wham! That’s the sound of my right cross smashing your hollow cranium.
I had to lightly edit your letter just to get it into the magazine because what you wrote was too confusing. Read your first “sentence,” which I didn’t edit. It contains 53 words. If I could run on like that lousy sentence, I’d be a champion ultra-marathoner. When you’re done with that, I want you to look up tense and apply it to your writing.
Maybe Ol’ Bullethead is getting out of hand with being mean. Nah, I think I’m being nice by not specifically pointing out the rest of the crap you screwed up. If you handed me a report with half that many mistakes on it, I’d hit it with so much red ink that your computer would cry.
I can hear the rest of you going off about how Bullethead is one of those sergeants who kicks reports back because I think I’m an English teacher. Wrong, suckers! I kick reports back because you made a little B.S. stop outside a liquor store. You remember this one? You got a gun off of some gangster and sent him to the pit—no big deal. Wait now, has anyone caught on yet? That’s right, your little B.S. stop might end up like Terry v. Ohio, and I want you and our profession to look good when that report makes it to the Supreme Court and then gets analyzed for eternity.
Even if it wasn’t in English, Jerome’s question about sleep deprivation is important. The worst for me, post military service, was as a detective chasing serious scumbags. Sometimes we would stand 20-plus-hour days for days on end and keep on going. We had an IV unit at the local coffee shop so we could mainline high octane. About halfway through that assignment I gave up coffee and switched to green tea. (Yeah, I do yoga sometimes too. Sue me!)
When I got away from the caffeine it actually got easier. After working all those hours, the problem this posed for us was that we might find the armed-and-dangerous crook hiding somewhere, and then we’d need to make safe and clear decisions. We asked each other a lot of questions. If we all agreed, we’d shake our heads and ask again because it meant we weren’t thinking critically. We had a lot of experience in that unit, and, without a doubt, that’s what got us through.
This is a bigger problem with young patrol cops. They think they’re invincible and don’t realize when they’re making bad decisions because of sleep deprivation. Management’s problem here is related more to money management than laziness. Extending a shift is cheaper than bringing in another cop for the whole time. That’s a shortsighted approach, because if a cop makes a bad decision and ends up in the ringer, they’ll turn it onto the agency.
In July 2001, the FBI put an article in its LE bulletin, outlining the biggest problems with sleep deprivation. Mood, cognitive function and motor performance are the problems. That equates to rudeness, use of force, shootings and bad driving as issues tied to sleep deprivation, all major concerns to cops and management.
I’m not smart enough to pull that out of my rear end, Jerome. After you learn English, check out Google. Every cop needs to read that article, and then take a nap.