WS - E - Analysis of Police Department Staffing

summer workload and response time are also inversely correlated. The more officers a department has, the lower the workload in the summer, and the lower the response time the department will experience. Again, this finding is intuitively obvious. Workload (work/staffing) will decrease with a greater number of officers and more officers will be available to respond to CFS faster. Interestingly, however, is that winter workload and crime rate do not factor into staffing decisions. In common-sense terms, these statistics indicate two important factors associate with police staffing decisions. The departments in the ICMA analyses increase staffing to meet 911 CFS volume. The more CFS a community accepts (controlling for population), the larger its police department will be. Also, it appears that departments make staffing decisions to accommodate peak workload demands. ICMA selects weekends in the summer to understand peak CFS volume contrasted with the lowest available staffing. It is no secret that officers look to take days off during the summer, and particularly weekends in the summer, and this is usually when departments face staffing shortages. This analysis supports the conclusions that departments make staffing decisions with this in mind. According to these statistics, the number of officers in a department is predicted by weekend summer demand: the more officers, the lower the demand. Clearly, this must be considered one of the most important variables that factor into department staffing decisions. There are many shortcomings with this analysis, and caution must be exercised interpreting these results too aggressively. However, there is ample information here to provide police executives and researchers to pause and think about the factors associated with police staffing decisions. It does appear, albeit from this limited sample, that crime is not a factor, response time is not a factor, and service demands are not a factor, but CFS rate and peak-demand staffing are factors. This finding presents a very important point for discussion for police chiefs and City/Town Managers about exactly what are they paying for when it comes to staffing a police department. CFS and summer vacations are manageable. Perhaps when it comes to increasing or decreasing the size of a police department, the mangers responsible for these decisions should look first at the quantity and quality of CFS actually being handled by the department, as well as how the officers are allocated and deployed in order to meet peak service demands. 12