WS - E - Analysis of Police Department Staffing

personnel away from their primary patrol assignments. On a typical shift it is common that 25 percent of the officers assigned will be unavailable for patrol because of another competing responsibility. 2 Therefore, in order to ensure that 12.5 officers are available to meet peak workload demands and adhere to the 60 percent saturation index threshold, a staffing adjustment must be made so as to assign additional officers to work with the expectation that a certain complement will be unavailable because of other demands. The right-most column in Table 3 presents the number of officers that need to be assigned in order to meet appropriate levels of workload in Victory. At 12:00 a.m., in order to meet the peak workload demand of 7.52 officer- hours, the 60 percent threshold dictates that 12.5 officers need to be working. This means that 17 officers need to be scheduled for that time (12.5/.75 = 17, rounding up to the nearest whole number). Inspection of the next row of Table 3 shows the workload and required staffing for the 1:00 a.m. hour. In this case the peak workload is 7.12 police-hours, and 16 officers must be scheduled to work in order for 11.9 of them to be available to meet that peak workload within the 60 percent threshold. Using the same calculation for each hour of the day results in a 24-hour staffing distribution. As shown in the table, required hourly staffing for peak workload ranges from a high of 20 officers at to a low of 9 officers. The table also shows that the staffing requirement is not uniform; it fluctuates throughout the day. During our study, patrol officers reported anecdotally of being very busy handling calls and managing the workload. Examination on Table 3 illustrates that peak staffing that is needed almost always is greater than the staffing levels currently deployed in the VPD. The ordinary staffing levels of 10 to 12 officers on each platoon explains why officers report being very busy, as the VPD’s current staffing plan is inadequate to meet peak demand staffing. The challenge of managing patrol operations is to ensure that sufficient resources are available to meet demand through appropriate staffing and scheduling. The VPD employs two 12-hour shifts with essentially fixed personnel assignments. The fixed nature of the staffing, combined with the variable nature of workload demands, will naturally create periods of personnel surplus and shortage throughout the day. The goal is to minimize these surpluses and shortages and create a work schedule that reduces the variance between demand and supply. In an ideal world, the VPD would be able to carve out the right number of people working at the precise hour to meet both supply and demand. Unfortunately, the rigid nature of the deployment schedule makes this impossible. Thus, the perfect state can only be approximated by creating the “best fit” of patrol staffing and workload demand. The best fit occurs when the variation between workload demand and police officer supply is the lowest. This best fit is 2 The Police Executive Research Forum recognizes 75 percent as the appropriate factor for determining patrol availability staffing. 20