Effect of Secondary Tasks on Police Officer Cognitive Workload and Performance Under Normal and Pursuit Driving Situations

2021 ◽  
pp. 001872082110109
Author(s):  
Maryam Zahabi ◽  
Vanessa Nasr ◽  
Ashiq Mohammed Abdul Razak ◽  
Ben Patranella ◽  
Logan McCanless ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Police Officer ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Mental Workload ◽  
Driving Performance ◽  
Cognitive Workload ◽  
Secondary Tasks ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Vehicle Technologies ◽  
Task Modality

Objective The objective of this study was to assess the effects of single and multiple secondary tasks on officers’ performance and cognitive workload under normal and pursuit driving conditions. Background Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of police line of duty injuries and deaths. These crashes are mainly attributed to the use of in-vehicle technologies and multi-tasking while driving. Method Eighteen police officers participated in a driving simulation experiment. The experiment followed a within-subject design and assessed the effect of single or multiple secondary tasks (via the mobile computer terminal (MCT) and radio) and driving condition (normal vs. pursuit driving) on officers’ driving performance, cognitive workload, and secondary task accuracy and reaction time. Results Findings suggested that police officers are protective of their driving performance when performing secondary tasks. However, their workload and driving performance degraded in pursuit conditions as compared to normal driving situations. Officers experienced higher workload when they were engaged with secondary tasks irrespective of the task modality or type. However, they were faster but less accurate in responding to the radio as compared to the MCT. Conclusion Police officers experience high mental workload in pursuit driving situations, which can reduce their driving performance and accuracy when they are engaged in some secondary tasks. Application The findings might be helpful for police agencies, trainers, and vehicle technology manufacturers to modify the existing policies, training protocols, and design of police in-vehicle technologies in order to improve police officer safety.

Police Officer Interactions with In-vehicle Technologies: An On-Road Investigation

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 1976-1980
Author(s):  
Farzaneh Shahini ◽  
Maryam Zahabi ◽  
Ben Patranella ◽  
Ashiq Mohammed Abdul Razak
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Mental Workload ◽  
Short Exposure ◽  
Short Exposure Time ◽  
Emergency Situations ◽  
Simulated Environment ◽  
Vehicle Technology ◽  
Vehicle Technologies

Police motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of officers’ fatalities in line of duty. These crashes have been attributed not only to driving at high speed in emergency situations but more importantly to interaction with different in-vehicle technologies. Prior studies in this domain have been limited to specific equipment and short exposure time and were typically conducted in laboratory settings with simulated environment or tasks which limit their generalizability to actual police operations. The objective of this study was to identify the most frequently used and cognitively demanding in-vehicle technologies for police officers while driving. Ten officers participated in a three-hour ride-along study. Findings suggested that the mobile computer terminal is the most frequently used and visually and cognitively demanding in-vehicle technology for police officers. Other factors such as work shift, duration, and average time spent in the vehicle per shift can also affect workload. The results indicated the need for improvements in in-vehicle technology design and implementation, officer training protocols, and departmental policies in order to reduce officers’ mental workload and improve safety in police operations.

scholarly journals In-field training in the police: Learning in an ethical grey area?

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (8) ◽  
pp. 569-581
Author(s):  
Linda Hoel ◽  
Erik Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Police Officer ◽  
Professional Learning ◽  
Workplace Learning ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Field Training ◽  
Ethical Attitude ◽  
And Performance

Purpose Although workplace learning is an important part of professional learning, little is known about the unethical aspects of workplace learning. This study aims to describe students’ learning experiences from in-field training in the police. This paper aims to examine how workplace learning can challenge proper ethical professional development and thus become a question of ethical concern. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on open-ended questions in a questionnaire among Norwegian police students (N = 277) who had ended their one year’s in-field training and had returned to campus for the third and final year of police education. The data are analysed by means of a qualitative content analysis. Findings The paper presents two findings. First, the students learn best from assignments that push them beyond their comfort zone. Second, students struggle with their own expectations of themselves as police officers. The findings suggest that workplace learning leaves students aspiring to demonstrate their capability to be a police officer, rather than focusing on learning to be a police officer. Practical implications The study can provide organisations such as educations, public services and businesses with better understanding on how to enrich learning in their on-the-job training manuals and programmes to evolve ethical professional behaviour. Ethical considerations can help leadership to improve efficiency and performance at the workplace. Originality/value How the potentially unethical aspects of workplace learning can influence the profession’s ethical attitude is an understudied topic in studies on learning to become a professional.

Police Escalation and the Motor Vehicle

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-155
Author(s):  
Jordan Blair Woods
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Racial Disparity ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Motor Vehicles ◽  
Traffic Stops ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Vehicle Technologies ◽  
System Today

This article, prepared for the special issue on investigations, presents an original empirical analysis of the role of the motor vehicle in shaping how officers describe experiencing violence and perceiving danger during vehicle stops. Tens of millions of traffic stops occur every year, making vehicle stops the most common interaction that civilians have with law enforcement. Although traffic stops are commonly described as dangerous settings for police officers, little is known about how the motor vehicle itself shapes officer descriptions, perceptions, and experiences of danger and harm during these stops. The presented findings make at least four key contributions to scholarship and policing law and policy. First, the findings inform unfolding criminal law reforms surrounding the policing and criminalization of traffic offenses, which are major sources of racial disparity in, and net-widening of, the criminal justice system today. Second, the findings prompt questions about whether and when legal actors, and especially actors that regulate the police, should defer to officer danger narratives involving motor vehicles. Third, the findings prompt novel questions about technology and the law, and more specifically, the ability of new motor vehicle technologies to help diffuse officer perceptions of danger that stem from motor vehicles. Fourth and finally, the findings illustrate a need to pay greater attention to the motor vehicle as a source of officer danger and harm in official policing data in order to accurately measure the risks and costs of policing during vehicle stops.

Introducing Multimodal Sliding Index: Qualitative Feedback, Perceived Workload, and Driving Performance with an Auditory Enhanced Menu Navigation Method

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruta R. Sardesai ◽  
Thomas M. Gable ◽  
Bruce N. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Device ◽  
Mental Workload ◽  
Driving Performance ◽  
Audio Cues ◽  
Qualitative Feedback ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
Driving Task ◽  
Perceived Workload ◽  
New Type ◽  
Navigation Method

Using auditory menus on a mobile device has been studied in depth with standard flicking, as well as wheeling and tapping interactions. Here, we introduce and evaluate a new type of interaction with auditory menus, intended to speed up movement through a list. This multimodal “sliding index” was compared to use of the standard flicking interaction on a phone, while the user was also engaged in a driving task. The sliding index was found to require less mental workload than flicking. What’s more, the way participants used the sliding index technique modulated their preferences, including their reactions to the presence of audio cues. Follow-on work should study how sliding index use evolves with practice.

“Laying Hands” and Learning to Touch and Grab in the Police Academy

2019 ◽  
pp. 446-468
Author(s):  
Brian Lande
Keyword(s):  
Police Officer ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Gain Control ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Police Culture ◽  
Police Academy ◽  
Attitudes And Beliefs ◽  
Police Recruits ◽  
Hands On

Research on the formation of police officers generally focuses on the beliefs, accounts, and categories that recruits must master. Becoming a police officer, however, is not simply a matter of acquiring new attitudes and beliefs. This article attends to an unexplored side of police culture—the sensorial and tactile education that recruits undergo at the police academy. Rubenstein wrote in 1973 that a police officer’s first tool is his or her body. This article examines the formation of the police body by examining how police recruits learn to use their hands as instruments of control. In police vernacular, this means learning to “lay hands” (a term borrowed from Pentecostal traditions) or going “hands on.” This chapter focuses on two means of using the hands: searching and defensive tactics. It describes how instructors teach recruits to use their hands for touching, manipulating, and grabbing the clothing and flesh of others to sense weapons and contraband. It also examines how recruits are taught to grab, manipulate, twist, and strike others in order to gain control of “unruly” bodies. It concludes by discussing the implications of “touching like a cop” for understanding membership in the police force.

scholarly journals A systematic review of definitions of motor vehicle headways in driver behaviour and performance studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Raaj Kishore Biswas ◽  
Rena Friswell ◽  
Jake Olivier ◽  
Ann Williamson ◽  
Teresa Senserrick
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Driver Behaviour ◽  
And Performance

scholarly journals Electrophysiological and performance variations following driving events involving an increase in mental workload

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo Loeches De La Fuente ◽  
Catherine Berthelon ◽  
Alexandra Fort ◽  
Virginie Etienne ◽  
Marleen De Weser ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Workload ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Performance Variations

“The Greatest Thrill I Get is When I Hear a Criminal Say, ‘Yes, I Did it’”: Race and the Third Degree in New Orleans, 1920–1945

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Adler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
A Cell ◽  
Short Time

On May 11, 1938, two New Orleans policemen entered the Astoria Restaurant, marched to the kitchen, and approached Loyd D. T. Washington, a 41-year-old African American cook. They informed Washington that they would be taking him to the First Precinct station for questioning, although they assured the cook that he need not change his clothes and “should be right back” to the “Negro restaurant,” where he had worked for 3 years. Immediately after arriving at the station house, police officers “surrounded” Washington, showed him a photograph of a man, and announced that he had killed a white man in Yazoo City, Mississippi, 20 years earlier. When Washington insisted that he did not know the man in the photograph, that he had never been to (or even heard of) Yazoo City, and that he had been in the army at the time of the murder, the law enforcers confined him in a cell, although they had no warrant for his arrest and did not charge him with any crime. The following day, a detective brought him to the “show-up room” in the precinct house, where he continued the interrogation and, according to Washington, “tried to make me sign papers stating that I had killed a white man” in Mississippi. As every African American New Orleanian knew, the show-up (or line-up) room was the setting where detectives tortured suspects and extracted confessions. “You know you killed him, Nigger,” the detective roared. Washington, however, refused to confess, and the detective began punching him in the face, knocking out five of his teeth. After Washington crumbled to the floor, the detective repeatedly kicked him and broke one of his ribs. The beating continued for an hour, until other policemen restrained the detective, saying “give him a chance to confess and if he doesn't you may start again.” But Washington did not confess, and the violent interrogation began anew. A short time later, another police officer interrupted the detective, telling him “do not kill this man in here, after all he is wanted in Yazoo City.” Bloodied and writhing in pain, Washington asked to contact his family, but the request was ignored. Because he had not been formally charged with a crime, New Orleans law enforcers believed that Washington had no constitutional protection again self-incrimination or coercive interrogation and no right to an arraignment or bail, and they had no obligation to contact his relatives or to provide medical care for him.

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