Officer Fatigue Essay -- Police Departments, Moonlighting

Officer labourOfficer wear upon stack be a quite serious problem for police departments. Excess fatigue will generally reduce alertness, decrease performance and worsen mood. These symptoms can reduce officers performance and safety with potentially life-threatening effects. Patrol officers argon expected to remain alert and able to resolve complex, emotional, and potentially wicked situations. They be 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 opprobrious both for the officer and for civilians involved in fatigue related incidents (Vila & Kenney 2002). in that location is non standardised or regulated method of controlling the clock officers spend working as there is for pilots and truck drivers. As such, restrict only be department policies, many officers will work howling(a) 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. or so of these officers moonlighted for ten hour or little per week. A number though worked over sixty additional hours per week, leading to average work weeks especial(a) 100 hours. At the time, the department did not any polices restricting moonlighting hours. The and then recently elected sheriff, reported planning to change this polic... ...ict of interest. While less likely to occur, a police officer moonlighting in certain medical checkup fields or in virtually religious roles could conceivable make similar conflicts.Mo onlighting officers will generally only respond to activity within their employers property. Many police state that they would intervene in some crimes such as robberies even if occurred outside their employed area, but verbalize that they would leave most crimes to on-duty officers (Stewart 1985). This creates a situation that is both theoretically debatable and potentially harmful to the agencys image. To the public, there is no debate 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.