According to Vila (1996), the best previous evidence of the pervasiveness of fatigue comes from official data showing that officers in most law enforcement agencies work overtime and that overtime expenditures constitute a substantial proportion of many police agencies overall operating procedure. While there is no direct information about how this overtime is distributed among officers or its impact, a recent preliminary survey of 10 of the largest U.S. police agencies indicates that formal policies limiting hours worked are almost nonexistent. As a result, patrol officers in high-crime urban areas routinely work substantial amount of overtime, while some officers at times routinely work extended hours (Vila, 1996).
             The literature on the effects of fatigue on performance, heath, and safety has been developed extensively in such fields as industrial and safety engineering, management, ergonomics, human factors, medicine, psychology, and sociology. Much of this research is directly relevant to police wor
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