Voluntary Work Schedule Adjustment: Fill & Download for Free

There are several reasons for this, none of them especially good ones.Larger agencies can “flex” work hours and make arrangements for overworked officers when the need occurs. Unfortunately, most agencies aren’t of the “larger” variety. About 80% of the 18,000+ law enforcement agencies in the country have fewer than 25 sworn officers, many of them a lot fewer. When you don’t have all that may people to begin with, it’s a lot more difficult to adjust schedules to allow someone more time off to rest. There are many outfits that lack enough officers to have 24-hour coverage. When there is an after-hours emergency, someone has to be called from home.There is a management term called “minimum staffing.” This, in theory, dictates the fewest number of cops you can have working at any one time in order to ensure adequate coverage and livable response times. My department didn’t have any numbers associated with “minimum staffing,” and the only time I heard the term used was when someone was trying to get any extra day or two off for personal business, and it would be denied because of minimum staffing. I noticed that the number for minimum staffing varied quite a bit, depending on who the supervisor and the officers negotiating the time off were. One night, I saw that minimum staffing was apparently five patrol cops, when we might have 15–20 on a more typical night.When the police officers union is strong, minimum staffing is a contractual issue. If absences take the manpower level below whatever number is established for minimum staffing (and this can vary with the time of day and the time of year, with special levels for events like New Year’s Eve and St. Patrick’s Day), the department is required to pay overtime and either hold officers over from the previous shift, direct officers from the next shift to come in early, or call in officers from their days off. This obviously gets expensive, and can just aggravate the problem of not getting enough rest between shifts.Some agencies have bunk rooms inside the station where officers can grab a few hours of sleep between shifts or when a court appearance is a few hours before or after a scheduled shift. When cops are held over for an emergency, a supervisor might poll the group from time to time and tell officers who have been on duty too long to head for the bunk room for 4–6 hours.Calling in people when they should be sleeping is sometimes unavoidable if you don’t interrupt normal operations. My former employer bought an early version of a computerized (it ran on a Macintosh, the only Apple product in the agency) facial composite program. About a dozen of us were trained to use it, but for some reason, my name was the only one anyone could remember when someone needed to make a composite. I would get called in during the day, when I was normally sleeping, to come down to the station and make the composite. They had to do this while the witness was available and the face was still fresh in their minds.Putting on training can also screw up the work schedule. My department worked a 4/10 schedule, meaning we were on duty for ten hours a day, four days per week. There were two teams of cops assigned to each shift, with one working when the other was on their regular days off. Everybody worked on Friday. The idea was that in-service training would be held on Fridays, and half the cops could be in training while the other half worked the street. Often, no one had bothered to schedule any training, and there would be so many cops working we would run out of patrol cars and have to double up. When there was training, it would often run from 0800–1700 for the convenience of the trainers. For me, this meant working until 0800 Thursday morning, not going to work at 2200 that night as usual, and instead reporting for training at 0800 the next morning. We would be released around 1700, but were expected to be back and ready for a patrol shift at 2200, five hours later. Management’s (who worked 0800–1700 , Monday-Friday) philosophy was that five hours between shifts was enough if you had to do it only once or twice a month. They neglected to take into account travel time between home and work, meals, personal hygiene, and preparing one’s uniform and equipment for the next shift. I was doing well to get three hours of sleep on those days.I saw some occasional heroic efforts. One colleague worked an overnight shift, then went directly to an voluntary overtime gig at the state fair that was going to go for another eight hours. His intent was to work that, then go home and get a few hours of sleep before the next watch. Toward the end of that overtime assignment, he made an arrest on a complicated case that took him 6–7 hours to write up and book evidence. He was back for the next briefing, having been on duty for a full 24 hours. He almost made it through another ten-hour shift, but while talking to me on a break at a coffee shop, he dozed off and woke up several times in mid-conversation, completely unaware he was doing it. I called another cop over to drive his car to the station, and he rode as a passenger in my patrol car. We took him home. Fortunately, that was the beginning of our regular days off, so he was able to get some rest.Probably the greatest obstacle to minimum rest periods between shifts is the cops themselves. When cops are wrung out from being on duty without adequate rest, it’s likely because the cop is working one or more “pay jobs,” where he works in uniform, but is often being paid by a private entity, like a shopping mall, construction contractor, or a nightclub. Exactly how these jobs are managed depends on the department and the part of the country. In the Midwest and Southeast U.S., it would be unusual to find many cops who didn’t have one or more pay jobs going. Police are not paid well at many of these agencies, and without the extra income, the cops would starve.If minimum rest periods were mandated, many of the pay jobs would be unworkable, and the cops would oppose that.This is very much a problem. The best and most thorough research on the topic was done by Brian Vila, now a professor at Washington State University. Tired Cops was his Ph.D. dissertation. However, because of the wide variation in law enforcement agencies across the country, I don’t expect anything to be done about the problem.

T4A2A, “Thanks for the ‘Ask to Answer,’” Muayad.Respectfully, no dog does anything on anyone’s schedule buttheir own schedule andNature’s schedule.At the heart of it all, all dogs are always in control all the time and if their minds-and-brains determine it’s a no go, well, then it’s a no go. It makes sense: as wild animals, their in-the-moment reactions and their controlling their own behavior is what keeps them alive.Your job as the leader and owner is to remain patient and find the thing or things you need to do to get the dog to voluntarily do the things you want—it’s called training. Their voluntary participation is what so many owner-leaders forget: that can’t be forced.Puppies are born with no rules. Is a puppy getting that bathroom urge? A puppy’s time to address it is now. You’re the one who’s getting trained. You’re getting trained to watch for when the puppy is beginning to come close to crossing that line. As you get trained, you learn how to train the puppy.Small K9 Spaces vs. Large K9 SpacesThese four points can be confusing to wrap one’s head around, but reread them until they make sense:Through their DNA programming, all dogs are programmed to keep small, personal spaces clean for as long as possible.[math]^{\text{[1]}}[/math]Dogs given small spaces trigger their DNA programming to keep their personal spaces clean. (See point 4.)No dog will hold it forever.Dogs given large spaces will NOT have their DNA programming triggered to keep their personal spaces clean. (See point 2.)The Canine Misinformation BubbleLeadership errors, training inconsistencies, and K9 behavioral problems come from unknowingly operating from within The Canine Misinformation Bubble. A leader’s awareness of it establishes and reinforces its line. There is no systematic notification that happens to alert owner-leaders of their operating from within the bubble.Owners that aren’t aware they’re operating from within the Canine Misinformation Bubble typically and wronglyavoid K9 discipline,[math]^{\text{[2]}}[/math]act human nicely to dogs,give their dog free run of a homebelieving those behaviors are appropriate, desired, preferred, and good. Those three points, though tend to establishlots of obsessive, unwanted K9 behaviors,lack of K9 boundaries, andpatterns of dogs pooping and peeing in the home.Most owners understand that a puppies’ bladder and bowel control change and grow as they grow. Their schedules adjust and converge and eventually can be trained to follow a schedule, but that adjustment and convergence happens when Nature says so, not when you say they should be ready.It comes back to patience once again; it’s about the human, not about the dog.[math]^{\text{[1]}}[/math]The proof is anecdotal, but backed up by most leader-owners.[math]^{\text{[2]}}[/math]Discipline is and are the rules, boundaries, and limitations the human leader-owner follows and demands from their dog. No aggression ever gets expressed by the human toward any dog. Dogs respond through patience, never through force or compulsion. Nature decides; the human is never in charge.

Jessica Hui described the negative effects that occur as a result of voluntary or imposed shifts in the timing of sleep. If you have a stable sleep schedule that is substantially later than the conventional or desired time, you may have delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS), which is a circadian rhythm disorder thought to involve mechanisms intrinsic to the circadian system. Some research has suggested that the pathophysiology of DSPS may involve an unusually long intrinsic circadian period, but other explanations are possible, such as a hypersensitivity to evening light. Prevalence among adults, equally distributed among women and men, is approximately 0.15%, or 3 in 2,000.People with DSPS are characterized as being extreme "night owls," and display a habitual pattern of late sleep onsets (2-6 am). When allowed to follow their own schedules, they exhibit normal sleep quality and duration for their age. Their sleep architecture is normal and they have no trouble maintaining sleep once sleep has begun.DSPS patients experience problems when attempting to adjust their sleep schedule to earlier times. They will often experience insomnia when trying to go to sleep earlier than usual, and will often have trouble trying to get up at normal waking hours. Here are some more relevant negative aspects of DSPS from a review article by Okawa and Uchiyama (2007):The continuing mismatch between the daily schedule required by the social environment and the individual’s circadian sleep–wake pattern creates major social, work, and academic problems. This discrepancy has been given the appropriate and pictorial name of ‘‘social jet lag’’.Sometimes DSPS patients complain of headache, loss of appetite, depressed mood, and loss of concentration. These symptoms could be caused by forced awakening in the morning to adjust their daily lives to social demands.Read the article here: http://www.chronobiology.ch/chronobiology.data/Dokumente/PDF/PDF_Chrono_Psychiatry/Okawa_07.pdfDSPS is also associated with unipolar depression. One study by Kripke and colleagues (2008) reported that DSPS patients had higher current depression ratings and a greater life-time history of unipolar depression, depression treatment, and anti-depressant use than controls. Moreover, the researchers also found that DSPS patients also had a greater family history of depression, which suggests that DSPS and depression share genetic susceptibility factors. Read the article here: http://www.jcircadianrhythms.com/content/pdf/1740-3391-6-6.pdfRead more about DSPS:Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndromeReview article on circadian rhythm sleep disorders with a section on DSPS - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2082099/