Performance Recovery and Optimization (PRO) Program

Voiceover

00:00

Welcome to The Beat—a podcast series from the COPS Office at the Department of Justice. Featuring 

interviews with experts from a varied field of disciplines, The Beat provides law enforcement with the 

latest developments and trending topics in community policing.

Jennifer Donelan

00:16

I'm your host, Jennifer Donelan, and today we will hear from Dr. Brandi Burque. She's a psychologist 

with the San Antonio Police Department. And today we're discussing the program there called 

Performance and Recovery Optimization or PRO. So, welcome to The Beat, Dr. Burque.

Dr. Brandi Burque

00:32

Thank you very much.

Donelan

00:33

Tell us, what is Performance and Recovery Optimization or PRO?

Burque

00:37

All right. So, it was a program that was started with our cadets in 2013. It was a program that was 

developed in conjunction with Air Force Security Forces. Dr. Deloria Wilson is the operational 

psychologist for Security Forces, and her and I have worked together for years. When we worked in the 

Army together, we found that there was a lot of new resiliency programs, new stress management 

programs that were pretty good but we wanted something that was targeted more to the culture of law 

enforcement. So, we drew upon military psychology, police psychology, and mainly a lot of sports 

psychology to develop this training program. It's a comprehensive—you could call it a wellness, you 

could call it resiliency—it's just an all-around stress management program for police officers and their 

families even.

And so, how it's been developed is we first started with cadets. We have an eight- to 10-hour block with 

our cadets that we teach skills such as what the optimal responses in terms of adrenaline and cortisol, 

and we talk about how to modulate it through controlled breathing, muscle control, performance selftalk, attention management, a recharging module to talk about sleep and nutrition, and mental practice 

as well, trying to imagine something. And a lot of this has had great influence in sports psychology, a lot 

of scientific evidence to support it, we can use it in police too. And then, I go out with them during 

driving and tactics to reinforce the skills. And then, we developed in a five-hour in-service block so that 

every single officer in the department has been trained in the basics of this resiliency program last year.
So every Tuesday of last year for our in-service we taught officers on this and now we're currently 

developing a three-day program that's more intensive that's taught by me and other officers that focus 

on short-term and long-term performance on the job and how to increase wellness in terms of 

cardiovascular disease health too.

Donelan

02:34

And today, discussing on The Beat, what do you hope that our listeners, officers from other places 

around the country, will gather from our discussion?

Burque

02:42

Whenever there's a health problem identified, whether that's cardiovascular disease, even mental 

health issue such as suicide, depression, substance abuse, or stress, anxiety, PTSD, whenever that's 

identified in the department, you kind of see kind of this one-shot approach to something. It was like, 

well, now we're going to educate everybody on the signs and symptoms of this particular problem and 

hopefully they know how to intervene if we just educate people. And it needs to go beyond that. So 

much of our stress management programs in law enforcement are just lecture. It's just death by 

PowerPoint and that's it. But it needs to be embedded throughout the entire department, all the way up 

from leadership buy-in, all the way through different innovative ways to do that.

And so, that's why I brought on board police officers to help me write the modules of the program 

because they're going to figure out ways to embed it in different aspects. So, we have a daily bulletin, 

for example, that goes out to every single officer every day that has a bunch of other stuff and we put in 

a PRO corner that highlights different mindset pieces from stoic philosophy or from sleep hygiene or 

anything like that to try to figure out ways to get this message across. And also for police departments, 

having a mental health provider is incredibly important but a mental health provider for police 

departments needs to be embedded in the police department. They need to go on ride-alongs. They 

need to be training at the academy. They need to be doing stuff to understand law enforcement and the 

culture to be able to provide effective services that can be used.

Donelan

04:11

Can you give us some examples from say a cadet perspective, a veteran officer or officer's family 

member, just why they would need or benefit from the PRO program.

Burque

04:24

One of my very first clients when I first started with the police department was a family and her husband 

had just recently died of a heart attack and it was absolutely devastating. They had a wonderful 

relationship, it was a wonderful family. She was on her own with three kids. And she always told me, she 

goes, "If he didn't have a heart attack, he'd still be working today. He loved his job. He loved his job."

And the cardiovascular disease risk, which is the number one killer of police officers, was so important, 
and if I could find a way to figure out how to incorporate education and training to hit not only mental 

health but also cardiovascular disease, that would be winning. And so, when we looked at stress, 

obviously adrenaline and cortisol impacts cardiovascular disease, also impacts mental health too. So, a 

program that incorporates all that is important. We've had officers come forward after in-service last 

year and I remember when one of our assistant chiefs had wanted us to do this for our in-service class.

And in-service is the most difficult audience you could ever teach for, and I thought, "Oh, this is going to 

be horrible because no one's going to like it," or whatever. Consistently every week we had officers 

come up to us and write critiques saying that this is something that they needed to hear every year. And 

in particular, one officer told me in the first time in 22 years, he felt as though that someone understood 

and cared about officer health and wellness for the department. We've even had cadets say they want 

more of it during the academy training. And even so, even on callouts I've had former cadets who are 

now police officers come up to me and just want to talk about an incident and be like, "Yeah, I 

remember exactly what you said in the academy, that's exactly what happened, and I really appreciate 

the training."

Donelan

06:02

Let's talk about that again, because all of our listeners might not be familiar with some examples of the 

techniques that you teach officers to deal with high adrenaline, stressful situations and what they can 

do to bring that stress down in the moment and in the long term.

Burque

06:17

Okay. Are you ready for a lecture?

Donelan

06:18

I am ready.

Burque

06:20

We know that there are different effects of adrenaline and cortisol when it's surging through 

somebody's system. And adrenaline dilates the blood vessels and lung airways and it gets you motivated 

for action and that's really good, but if you have too much of it for too long, it makes you sick to your 

stomach, weak and shaky. And then you've got cortisol on the other hand which is released around the 

same time. And it's got great properties, it does what it needs to do, but if you have too much of it for 

too long, you're increased for cardiovascular disease, inflammation, high blood pressure, all of that. But 

also cortisol doesn't make you think very clearly. And when we look at heart rate, for example, when 

you reach a certain level of heart rate, your ability to think clearly really starts to go out the window.

Your fine motor skills fall apart. All of that stuff.

There was even recently a fascinating study—this wasn't done in law enforcement, this was just done in 

general—that there's an area the brain that scans people's faces and determines whether someone's 
being very supportive or being very critical. And when it says that this person's being very critical, it 

communicates with an area of the brain that's responsible for fine motor skills, and fine motor skills 

start to shake and fall off. But what's more interesting is it causes muscle tension in your forearms and 

in your biceps so that whatever you're holding onto you grip down harder. Well, that says a lot because 

when an officer arrives on scene, nobody's saying, "Hey, we're so glad that you're here." They're yelling 

and screaming and they're very critical especially in this day and age. So, what is that doing to an 

officer's performance? Well, we can figure out ways, that's why training is so important. When there 

was a push to make police academies more collegiate, well, I was like, no, because we now know this is 

what happens to the body when it's under that amount of stress so we need to be able to inoculate 

someone to that stress so that they can be able to control themselves better. And so, if we can regulate 

that heart rate down, people tend to perform better. So, we look at controlled breathing, deep breaths, 

because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system to decrease adrenaline and cortisol. So then 

someone thinks clearly, their fine motor skills are intact. That's great. But we also do things such as 

muscle control, tensing and relaxing muscles, which is done in sports psychology.

And then, the more advanced techniques are looking at things such as performance self-talk. So, how 

you talk about a situation in your own head can impact how you perform. We had one of our driving 

instructors indicate that when he was going through driving school, one of the courses he was having a 

really difficult time with and it wasn't until he talked himself through that course that he did better. One 

of the most powerful ones that I think that we've incorporated is from sports psychology is called 

mental practice, and it's imagining a task from the very beginning to the very end to successful 

completion but imagining it in all five senses. And one of my good partners at the University of Texas at 

San Antonio, their human performance labs, so sports psychologist, demonstrated ways that you can 

teach mental practice, so you can show mental practice. Because it activates the same muscles as if you 

were actually doing it. So, they looked at downhill skiers and when they go through a simulator, even 

though they're not actually skiing, the same muscles are being used. So, we tell cadets, "Hey. When 

you're learning to do a felony stop, mentally practice that at night." And I give them my own stupid 

example because I learned the obstacle course and I was terrible at the obstacle course but the more I 

mentally practiced it, the better I got.

Donelan

09:40

And mentally practicing it is like going through your head like you're on the obstacle course, like, "Oh my 

gosh, I'm coming up to where I crawl underneath the ropes."

Burque

09:47

Yes.

Donelan

09:48

So, you're just visualizing it through your head?
Burque

09:50

Everything. And it activates the same muscles as if you're actually doing it. So, you know, we do those 

things to help them perform better in the academy which then hopefully will help them perform better 

on the job, but this stuff can be used at home too. We tell them, "Hey, you don't respond the same way 

to somebody complaining about the neighbor's dog barking that you would to, say, a domestic violence 

situation. How is that any different than when you come home and your spouse is upset about the day 

or your toddler's having a tantrum? The same skills you use to perform well at work you can perform 

well at home too." So, it's hitting that family piece. And so, these skills are translatable. We even did a 

version of PRO for middle school girl scouts, we just changed up the terminology. It still works.

Donelan

10:35

OK, so, there's the aspect of the program for cadets when they're training, eight hours. Group sessions?

Burque

10:41

Yeah, it's in a classroom. And we do a couple of different exercises to kind of demonstrate. One of the 

big ones is what we call the zombie exercise, which is I have a—it's a shower curtain with zombie targets 

and shoot and no-shoot targets. They have five seconds to view what's in front of them and they have to 

write it down. And then we show them how their attention can be misdirected. And then, throughout 

the whole academy experience, the other instructors are enforcing these types of skills, and then when 

I'm out there during tactics or some of the driving stuff, I reinforce the skills during briefs and debriefs.

Donelan

11:14

And then, for current officers, you have the one-day in-service?

Burque

11:18

Yeah, we did that last year, that was five hours. And then now we're in the middle of developing a threeday continuing education program.

Donelan

11:25

And then also if there’s an officer or his or her family feel like they need some help with these skills, they 

can schedule one-on-one time?

Burque

11:33

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, what's great about our San Antonio PD is that we have three embedded 

psychologists. We see officers and their families, unlimited amount of sessions at no cost. So, it could be 

for marital counseling, I see kids even for a wide range of different things.
Donelan

11:50

Do you find your program’s unique among police departments throughout the U.S.?

Burque

11:55

I think the information itself isn't necessarily unique. I think the delivery is unique. And just as an 

example that always stood out in my mind, after in-service I had an officer, his name is Officer Cliff Burns 

and he came up to me and he said, "You know, I really want to be a part of this. I really want to help 

develop it." I met with him a couple of times and he said, "I really want to bring kind of a stoic 

philosophy mindset." And he's like, "A lot of people don't know much about it or they have 

misconceptions about it but I think it would help." And I thought, "I don't know if he can—" and he 

accomplished it. He accomplished it so well. Our mindset module is phenomenal because of him. And he 

made such an impact when we presented it to our peer support team that we had officers quoting 

Marcus Aurelius on Facebook and Instagram. And so, I think it's the delivery that makes it different. The 

fact that we're embedded, the fact that it's officer driven, and that I'm out there helping whenever I can 

during live training.

Donelan

12:58

Well, fantastic. And with that, if any of our listeners want to find out more, where can they find you on 

the Internet?

Burque

13:04

Okay. So, we're developing a website but we have a Facebook page, it's called—if you just put in the 

Facebook search tool "Performance and Recovery Optimization," you'll find it, it's the only one there.

You can also e-mail me at brandipro2016@gmail.com. 

Donelan

13:24

And that's Brandi, B-R-A-N-D-I—PRO, P-R-O—2016—all one word, @gmail.com. Well, this has been truly 

fascinating to discuss what you all have been doing with this program, PRO, in San Antonio. I just really 

wanted to hear about the buy-in you have from it seems like from the chief right down to the actual 

cadets on the value of this. Any closing thoughts you would like to leave with the listeners of The Beat? 

Burque

13:48

I just think having a passion for this was something that I just really love and you got to find people that 

have a passion for officer safety and wellness as well because that's what's going to make or break any 

type of program.
Donelan

14:00

Dr. Burque, I can’t thank you enough for joining us today.

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14:04

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15:03

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