WS - E - Analysis of Police Department Staffing

police themselves (labeled “police”). Additionally, the workload figures discussed earlier (winter-summer, weekday-weekend) are incorporated into the analysis, as well as the average response time to CFS. The data presented above offer extremely useful—but unfortunately rarely used—pieces of information to understand police staffing and deployment. Rule of 60 Guidelines As a general guideline, ICMA applies a “Rule of 60” to evaluate police department staffing allocation and deployment. This Rule of 60 applies to three critical variables: 1. There should be approximately 60 percent of the total number of sworn officers in a department assigned to the patrol function. According to the table the mean patrol percentage is 66.1 percent. In other words the average department in this study assigns about two-thirds of its officers to patrol. 2. The average workload for patrol staffing should not exceed 60 percent. The mean workloads presented above for winter weekdays and weekends and summer weekdays and weekends are 26.6 percent, 28.4 percent, 28.7 percent, and 31.8 percent, respectively. This indicates that less than one-third of the available patrol resources are committed to demands from the community in the average department. The highest reported means in the sample of communities studied does not exceed the 60 percent threshold. In other words, the busiest communities in the ICMA analysis do not dedicate more than 60 percent of their patrol resources towards workload (which includes public initiated CFS, police-initiated CFS, administrative and out-of-service time, as well as directed patrol time). 3. The Total Service Time (officer-minutes) should not exceed a factor of 60. The mean service times presented above are 22.1 officer-minutes for a police initiated CFS, and 48.0 officer-minutes for a CFS received from the public through 911. Collectively, these three “Rule of 60” calculations represent much more comprehensive and robust variables to use in making police staffing allocation and deployment decisions. These variables are the foundation of ICMA’s assessment of an agency’s staffing decisions and the starting point for evaluating the staffing model used by a particular organization. These items permit the exploration of the questions “Are there enough officers?” “Are they assigned in the right units?” “Are we responding to the demand from the community in an appropriate fashion?” 10