WS - E - Analysis of Police Department Staffing

Lastly, and least common, are staffing decisions made on actual workload. ICMA is a strong advocate of this approach, as it relies on actual levels of demand for police services and matches that demand with the supply of police resources. Typically, this approach relies on an examination of calls for service received by a department, and these calls are modeled to understand demand and supply. This approach also has shortcomings in that it relies almost exclusively on demand through 911 calls and ignores other elements of community demands placed on a department. In order to overcome these shortcomings, and consistent with the approach used by ICMA, workload demands should be modeled and then placed in context with other operational demands facing the department. The result is a comprehensive assessment of workload through both calls for service and other sustained operational commitments placed on the department. This approach, however, requires a complex data analysis that is beyond the capacity of many police departments, but it nonetheless offers the most accurate and reliable predictor of police staffing levels. III. ICMA Research on Police Staffing Over the past five years, the ICMA Center for Public Safety Management (CPSM) has been engaged in providing consulting services to numerous communities across the country. Since 2008, ICMA has conducted police operational and data analyses in 61 cities and towns located in 26 states in all regions of the U.S.; populations of communities studied range from 8,000 to more than 800,000. These studies have allowed communities to understand the public demands placed upon the police and undoubtedly helped the communities make difficult staffing decisions. The data collected by CPSM also provides valuable insight into police operations around the country. Albeit a sample of convenience, the data derived from these 61 studies and discussed here provide interesting insight into staffing decisions made by the communities represented. The ICMA data analysis 1 relies on information captured in a department’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system. ICMA extracts one year’s worth of CAD calls for service and dispatch data in order to explore demand for police services. The analysis focuses on three main areas: workload, deployment, and response times. These three areas are related almost exclusively to patrol operations, which constitute the most significant portion of nearly any police department’s personnel and financial commitment. For the detailed workload analysis, ICMA uses two four-week sample periods. Typically, the first period is August, or summer, and the second period is February, or winter. Each and every call dispatched through 911 is identified for these two periods. The calls are isolated and a total amount of time spent handling the call is calculated. Once these calculations are made, the data is converted into tables and charts that display the demand for police services in hourly increments 1 A comprehensive discussion on workload analysis is presented in Section IV of this paper. The presentation of the information here is simply to describe some of the variables used in the ICMA research on staffing. 7