WS - E - Analysis of Police Department Staffing

Rule of 60 – Part 1 The first part of the Rule of 60 is an assessment of the ratio of personnel between patrol and total sworn staffing. ICMA recommends that approximately 60 percent of all sworn officers should be assigned to patrol in a CFS response function. This benchmark will be different for different communities and will likely increase as the department (and community) gets larger. In general, however, this is a useful benchmark to evaluate the personnel allocation in the department. Departments with patrol allocations much greater than 60 percent might indicate an over-investment in patrol (or under-investment in other areas of the organization). Rule of 60 – Part 2 The second part of the Rule of 60 examines workload and discretionary time and suggests that no more than 60 percent of patrol time should be committed to calls for service. In other words, ICMA suggests that no more than 60 percent of available patrol officer time be spent responding to the service demands of the community. The remaining 40 percent of the time is discretionary time for officers to be available to address community problems and be available for serious emergencies. This Rule of 60 for patrol deployment does not mean the remaining 40 percent of time is downtime or break time. It is simply a reflection of the point at which patrol officer time is saturated by CFS. This ratio of dedicated time compared to discretionary time is referred to as the saturation index (SI). It is ICMA’s contention that patrol staffing is optimally deployed when the SI is slightly less than 60 percent. An SI greater than 60 percent indicates that the patrol manpower is largely reactive, and overburdened with CFS and workload demands. An SI of somewhat less than 60 percent indicates that patrol manpower is optimally staffed. SI levels much lower than 60 percent, however, indicate patrol resources that are underutilized and signal an opportunity for a reduction in patrol resources or reallocation of police personnel. Departments must be cautious in interpreting the SI too narrowly. For example, one should not conclude that SI can never exceed 60 percent at any time during the day, or that in any given hour no more than 60 percent of any officer’s time be committed to CFS. The SI at 60 percent is intended to be a benchmark to evaluate service demands on patrol staffing. If SI levels are near or exceed 60 percent for substantial periods of a given shift, or at isolated and specific times during the day, decisions should be made to reallocate or realign personnel to reduce the SI to levels below 60. Lastly, this is not a hard-and-fast rule, but a benchmark to be used in evaluating staffing decisions. As noted earlier, a typical ICMA workload analysis involves the examination of weekdays and weekends (1800 Friday to 1800 Sunday) in the months of February and August. These 14