WS - E - Analysis of Police Department Staffing

across the 24-hour day for both weekdays and weekends. This gives us four distinct time periods to examine In addition to the workload, ICMA collects information about the number of officers assigned to patrol during these four time periods. Instead of using the number of officers scheduled, ICMA relies on the “actual” number of officers present and working on any given shift/day. This collection of information provides a more accurate and thorough picture of the actual demands placed on the workforce and allows ICMA to calculate “workload” as a percentage of available resources. During times when all available resources are committed to calls for service, workload would equal 100 percent. When there are no calls for service being handled in a given hour, workload would equal 0 percent. The product of the workload analysis is essentially four graphic figures that display the workload (demand/available staffing) encountered by the police department across the average day during the four periods (weekdays and weekends in both summer and winter). We believe strongly that workload is the critical determinant of police staffing. Ensuring the proper amount of police resources available throughout the day is the goal of staffing a police department efficiently. When the workload is low, there is a surplus of personnel, and officers are underutilized. When workload is too high, there is a shortage of personnel, and officers are overtaxed and services suffer. The statistics created by the ICMA-CPSM approach provide valuable tools to examine police staffing decisions. In addition to these data, the ICMA approach looks at population, crime, patrol staffing, total number of calls for service, response times, total service time for calls for service, and the 90th percentile response time for calls for service to evaluate department staffing decisions. Table 1 presents all the variables collected by ICMA for the 61 communities in the sample. 8