Police Departments Struggle to Keep Cops Cool as Temperatures Rise

The 100 officers that roam the scorching streets of Oro Valley, Ariz., have patrol cars, weapons, and badges. Last year, seven officers had something else: chest straps to read their heart rates and pills to monitor their body temperatures and log the results.

Hot summer weather in Arizona is to be expected, but police officers are at particular risk: Officers stand outside for long periods of time directing traffic and mediating disputes.

“If it’s hot out, they’re going to be suffering,” Stephanie Griffin, an assistant professor of community, environment and policy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told Bloomberg Environment, who oversaw the tests. In the summer in Arizona, she said, “it’s like you’re in hell.”

In many jurisdictions, regulatory agencies play a limited or no role, leaving departments to develop policies, specialized equipment, and training programs on their own.

Officers face a workplace culture that encourages consuming caffeinated beverages like coffee or energy drinks over water, Griffin said, and sometimes ignore signs of fatigue, even though how they handle the heat has implications for their safety and job performance.

Griffin’s team found that officers exceeded a threshold body heat limit on four monitored shifts. Heat stress can increase the risk of injury and cause cognitive impairment and decreased productivity.

‘No Question’ Officers at Risk

The problem is likely to get worse.

Oro Valley experiences about 139 days annually of 90 degrees or hotter, but could increase to as many as 158 days by 2040 because of climate change, according to an analysis by the Climate Impact Lab and other groups.

“A lot of places, during the summertime, there’s no question that it puts officers at risk,” said Dr. Alexander Eastman, a medical director and chief at the Rees-Jones Trauma Center at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, also a lieutenant in the Dallas Police Department.

In Oro Valley, all of the department’s officers completed a survey on heat exposure. About 30 percent reported symptoms of dehydration based on the color of their urine, Griffin said. Others reported heat rash, headaches, fatigue, and rapid heart rates.

The findings, which Griffin presented at a meeting of the American Industrial Hygiene Association in Philadelphia in May, could be published this winter or early next year.

Few other studies in the U.S. have examined how heat affects police officers, Griffin said.

At least four officers in the U.S. have died in heat-related incidents in training exercises since 2008, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a nonprofit organization based in Fairfax, Va., that tracks officer deaths.

The heat hits officers in two ways, Thomas Bernard, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of South Florida in Tampa, told Bloomberg Environment.

Heat exhaustion causes a lack of blood flow to the brain, causing officers to feel weakness, headaches, and nausea, Bernard said. Heat stroke ups the ante, impairing brain function and causing garbled speech, confusion, and more severe symptoms like convulsions or passing out.

Forseeable Hazards, Lack of Regulations

An absence of federal or state regulations—especially for public-sector employees like police—brings its own challenges.

California, Minnesota, and Washington have state regulations to prevent heat illness.

But the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t have a specific regulation for heat stress, relying instead on the general duty clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act—which requires employers to protect workers from foreseeable hazards.

For police officers, there’s a catch: only in 27 states are they subject to OSHA protection.

OSHA has guidance to help employers calculate the heat index—which combines air temperature and humidity into a single number—to determine the risk to workers.

Employers also can use guidance from the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists: The threshold limit for heat aims to prevent core body temperatures from rising more than 1 degree Celsius.

Staying Cool

Even without regulation, departments are taking different approaches to handling the heat.

Over time, many police agencies have moved away from a rigid adherence to traditional uniforms and allow for breathable garments, ball caps, or shorts.

Body armor worn over an officer’s clothing, instead of underneath a shirt, is equally safe but more comfortable, Senior Cpl. DeMarquis Black, a spokesman for the Dallas Police Department, told Bloomberg Environment.

Officers in Orlando, one of the nation’s warmest major cities, don’t have heat policies or procedures, but are trained to stay hydrated and take breaks when needed, Michelle Guido, a spokeswoman for the department, told Bloomberg Environment in an email.

In Phoenix, officer safety is handled by a specialized police safety unit, Sgt. Mercedes Fortune, a spokeswoman for the department, told Bloomberg Environment in an email. Officers also are issued CamelBak hydration backpacks.

Oro Valley’s police supervisors carry coolers of bottled water and ice, and officers are encouraged to take indoor breaks where water and ice machines are available, Char Ackerman, emergency management and safety coordinator at the department, told Bloomberg Environment.

Some officers use devices like CoolCop, a device that funnels cool air from a vehicle’s air conditioning directly beneath an officer’s bulletproof vest.

The department wants to learn more about how to protect officers without impeding their duties, Ackerman said.

“How can we make it be effective,” Ackerman said, “but also be a little bit nicer as it relates to heat?”