But Branford Deputy Chief Raymond Wiederhold says the disgruntled officers are just a whining minority in his department.

"I'm very health-minded myself. I'm not a fat, lazy police chief who sits here behind my desk smoking cigars, telling my men to work all of the time," says Wiederhold. "I work more than 60 hours a week myself! No one's health is being put in jeopardy by overtime," he says. But he admits that the force--with 26 patrol officers in a city of some 35,000 people--is inadequate and "could use 35 [more officers]."

Wiederhold, boasting that he's a runner and weightlifter, blames exhaustion on union officers' personal habits--like smoking and drinking alcohol. "Double shifts, for most guys, are not a problem. A double shift never hurt nobody!"

Changing the "Sleep Culture" What do the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the space shuttle Challenger explosion have in common? Mark Rosekind, a board member of the National Sleep Foundation based in Washington, DC, and president and chief scientist at Alertness Solutions, a consulting firm in Cupertino, California, says he wishes the answer would shock people into cutting overtime work. Both disasters involved "fatigued people making critical decisions," he says. "The first mate on the Valdez had been working 30 hours," Rosekind says. During the night of March 24, 1989, the Valdez oil carrier ran aground, spilling some 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. On January 28, 1986, NASA managers preparing the space shuttle Challenger launch "had been working long shifts--more than 20 hours--before making the critical decision on whether or not to go, with what they knew about the O-rings." The O-rings failed and caused the explosion, says Rosekind, who was later hired as director of NASA's Fatigue Countermeasures Program. Rosekind left NASA in 1997 to start his own company. "I thought: 'Here's all this information [on the effects of sleep deprivation] and nobody's getting it.' It was time to get out of the lab and do something about it," he says. Alertness Solutions now consults with businesses like airlines, railway companies, and trucking firms seeking ways to avoid fatigue-related accidents and boost productivity. The data it shares include statistics showing that working double shifts can be as damaging as drinking double martinis. Sleep deprivation can reduce attention and vigilance by 50%, decision-making ability by 50%, communication skills by 30%, and memory by 20%, says Rosekind. But the sleep-deprived may sense no change in their abilities. "There is a big gap between how people feel and how they really are," he explains. "This is a real issue--a health issue--and it puts people at risk!" But there is, he adds, a "historical and cultural" bias against reducing overtime work or rejecting it. "It's a macho thing. Saying you are fatigued means you are too tired and lazy, that you don't have 'the right stuff,'" he says. "But at some point if you sleep-deprive your brain, you are going to pay for that ... and we are paying, with lives."