Bryan Vila
Police officers, military personnel, and first responders often work long and erratic hours. How lack of sleep impacts their ability to perform, especially during deadly-force situations, when life and death decisions are made in seconds and minutes, is the subject of criminal justice professor Bryan Vila's research at WSU Spokane.
Vila spent 17 years in law enforcement before joining the academic ranks as an interdisciplinary researcher specializing in police fatigue issues.
"Cops and ground troops are faced with very similar problems," said Vila. "They have to make potentially deadly decisions to protect themselves and the citizenry around them, and they have to do it with sufficient restraint to protect people and with sufficient aggression to neutralize the situation."
It is a difficult human performance challenge since situations happen quickly and each is uniquely complex.
Deadly-force judgment and decision-making range, as seen from control station.
"First we have to understand what is involved in people making these sorts of judgments and decisions," said Vila. "What is possible and what is not."
Vila is director of the new Critical Job Tasks Simulation Laboratory located at the Sleep and Performance Research Center on WSU's Riverpoint campus, where he works closely with center director and research professor Greg Belenky, M.D., and assistant director and research professor Hans Van Dongen. It is the only facility in the world to combine a residential sleep lab with a high-fidelity simulation lab.
"What we are doing is to try and understand these important social and political issues and this important science issue," said Vila. "We are trying to put some hardnosed experimental research together by studying the neurophysiologic dynamics that affect human performance in these situations."
The lab is equipped with modified versions of the same training simulators that police and the military use to train their personnel, an approach that Vila said facilitates translation of research results back to the people working on the streets and in the field, and to policymakers.
The U.S. Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (through Advanced Brain Monitoring, Inc.), and the National Institute of Justice agree with Vila's holistic and accessible approach to problem solving and have funded him, as lead and co-investigator, for a combined total of nearly $2 million to conduct research on critical job tasks, training, and police performance evaluation at the lab.
The goal of the research is to improve the quality of deadly-force judgments and decisions.
"Everyone is safer, and the probability of tragedy is reduced," said Vila.
The critical tasks simulation laboratory equipment includes deadly-force judgment training simulators (to replicate violent encounters), driving simulators, eye-tracking devices that measure situational awareness and decision-making time, and smart garments that unobtrusively collect physiological data. The tools allow researchers to simultaneously monitor a wide range of physiological and behavioral variables, including alertness, situational awareness, arousal management, executive functions, and communication.
Established in 2004 through $4.5 million in Congressionally-directed funding, the Sleep and Performance Research Center includes a state-of-the-art human sleep research laboratory on the Riverpoint campus at WSU Spokane and two world-class basic sleep research laboratories on WSU's Pullman campus. The human sleep research laboratory accommodates carefully controlled experiments to study the effects of sleep and sleep loss on human cognitive functioning.
Bryan Vila served as director of the Division of Crime Control and Prevention Research at the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice before joining the WSU faculty in 2005. He received his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis, in 1990 and subsequently held tenured faculty positions at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Wyoming.
Before he became an academic, Vila served as a law enforcement officer for 17 years, including nine years as a street cop and supervisor with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, 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.
He is the author of numerous research articles and four books, including Tired Cops: The Importance of Managing Police Fatigue (Police Executive Research Forum, 2000).
Vila teaches courses on criminology theory, research methods, policing, crime control, human ecology, justice and human performance, and capital punishment, as well as drugs and crime.
The Chronicle, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University