Words of the Wise Podcast – September 15th, 2026 episode featuring Chief Perkins.
Listen on Spotify or YouTube.
“Chief Gráinne Perkins of the University of Southern Maine brings more than 28 years of experience across policing and academia in four countries to a forward-thinking conversation about wellness, fatigue, innovation, and public safety. She argues that mental fitness should be treated as an essential part of operational readiness rather than a benefit pushed to the edge of police culture.
In this episode, Chief Perkins reflects on working for 36 hours during a murder investigation and the dangerous assumption that officers can continue performing effectively without rest. Fatigue narrows perception, weakens judgment, and creates what she describes as a leakage in an officer’s abilities. She also shares how art-based perception training helped officers examine observation, bias, and the way exhaustion affects what they see. A major focus is her department’s evidence-based trial of 24-hour shifts. Rather than dismissing the idea, she examined research from policing, nursing, medicine, and the fire service before launching a measured pilot studying sleep, response times, work-life balance, and operational performance. Her approach is simple: listen to the team, test the idea, measure the results, and adapt based on evidence.
Chief Perkins also emphasizes a clear order of priorities: take care of yourself, then your family, and then the job. Officers who are not physically and mentally healthy cannot properly support their families, coworkers, or communities. She combines this philosophy with a culture that takes the mission seriously without taking itself too seriously. Her closing advice to younger officers is to protect their curiosity. Questioning why something has always been done a certain way is not disrespectful; it is often the first step toward improving an organization. Curiosity, evidence, and the courage to try something new are how policing continues to evolve.”
New USM police chief brings international experience
-Bangor Daily News