Officers Coming out of FTO – GREAT! Now, Where Should They Go?

Agencies can boost their efficiency and provide higher quality service to their community by strategically plugging in newly-minted cops.

There’s a staffing crisis in policing. No one is disputing that. Agencies are competing for the few and far between that decide law enforcement is a career choice for them. Some agencies are making great strides in that direction as more recruits make it through the background process and academy classes grow. Once those newly minted cops are ready to hit the street, the choice has to be made as to which shift needs them the most.

Which shift gets the coveted resources has historically been decided, and is still common practice, by command staff sitting around a table and making their pitch to put the new cops in their district or on their shift. I’ve heard from many agencies that continue to allocate patrol staff this way. Staffing decisions based on who makes the best pitch will only reward the best salesman in the room. It’s unlikely this method will alleviate the days and hours with the heaviest workload. If there were an unbiased way to allocate staff based on defensible needs, would you use it? I hope everyone reading this post answers a resounding “yes” to that question.

Whether you refer to it as data-driven or evidence-based policing, those terms have become synonymous: there is a lot of information at law enforcement’s disposal to help make smart decisions. The obstacle for many agencies may be the capability to harness that data at the level of specificity to provide a defensible and actionable solution that addresses staffing down to the day and hour.

Agencies can be ready to boost their efficiency and provide higher quality service to their community by strategically plugging those newly-minted cops into the exact right place. The number of officers scheduled to work can be balanced to match the varying demand within different areas.

Here’s what that could look like in practice. This agency has 48 officers assigned to 12 teams on this schedule.

This agency is trying to address issues related to Priority 2 call response times. This is the majority of their call load, the best and most frequent opportunity they get with their community to deliver quality service. With their current allocation of 48 officers, they are experiencing longer response times between 06:00 – 12:00 on most days of the week. The community is seeing a poor reflection of police response during the hours in which they feel they’re needed most.

There are 4 cops coming out of FTO that will need to be placed into the schedule. A common practice is to distribute the cops so that the team sizes will be equal. This would alleviate officers feeling slighted because their teams have fewer officers on the days they work than the same teams working on different days. Watch commanders could make the argument that their teams should get the new cops because, on the schedule, they appear to be understaffed. The below example places officers to equalize A teams and B teams.

Based on the above allocation of the 4 new officers, this is how the projected response time will be affected. There’s some relief to the response times throughout the week. However, from 06:00 – 07:00, the response time is still anticipated to be quite lengthy. There are still multiple hours with anticipated response times over 10 minutes.

Adding 4 officers, going from 48 to 52, may not seem like it would make much of a difference to response times. Yet, even small incremental additions can be impactful. It requires examining the data in such detail that it will reveal precise weak spots throughout the week. It also requires evaluating the available resources at those exact same intervals. Is it possible to allocate those 4 officers to surgically address those weak spots? YES!

Using Deploy, this agency tried every possible combination of where the four officers could be added and found the best way to positively impact Priority 2 response time was to add one officer each to the A Days teams and two officers to the B Days 07:00 team.

This allocation of the 4 officers made significant improvements to many more hours throughout the week. The original troublesome hours, 06:00 – 12:00, were reduced to an anticipated response time of less than 10 minutes, with the exception of Tuesday between 06:00 – 07:00, which is just slightly above 10 minutes.

These improvements were made by only adding 4 officers. Imagine adding many more officers multiple times throughout the year. The positive impacts can be significant! The key to maximizing those impacts is to utilize the CAD data available in such a detailed way that it will expose specific pain points and then apply your resources precisely when and where they do the most good.

To see how this could work for your agency or to learn more about how Corona Solutions maximizes patrol efficiency, click here.

2022 – Adjusting and Recalibrating

The ability to adjust and recalibrate is crucial for an agency to run its patrol division smartly and efficiently

As 2022 wrapped up, a reflection on the state of police staffing gradually started to appear. Gathering insight on staffing woes from across the country at different conferences and symposiums illustrated that, while each agency is unique, there are some basic problems they all face.

Three years ago, the world plunged into COVID uncertainty, and policing had to adjust. Next came the reckoning after the George Floyd incident, and policing had to adjust. Officers became disenchanted with the profession and left in droves, and policing is again having to adjust.

As we start 2023, law enforcement is dealing with high attrition and low recruitment. Anyone who has worked in law enforcement for more than a minute knows this will not be a quick or easy fix. Support for law enforcement is climbing back up. A lot of resources are now being devoted to officer wellness and safety, trying to address the underlying problems that led to high attrition and low recruitment. Isn’t that what those POP problem-solving classes taught us all those years? Address the underlying problem or condition; don’t just treat the symptoms. Law enforcement is entering an updated enlightenment phase. However, just like a cruise ship doesn’t turn on a dime, it will take a while for this transformation to occur. In the meantime, agencies need the ability to adjust and recalibrate in order to meet the demands of their community whilst hanging on to the staff they have.

As this metamorphosis occurs, there’s still the business of policing that needs to be done every day. During 2022, in an effort to try and adequately staff patrol, agencies reported disbanding specialized units, pulling detectives back to patrol, enacting 12-hour shifts (which may not be a good solution – see our previous blog post), and that excessive overtime is creating overworked and weary cops.

In 2022, law enforcement leaders, analysts, planners and researchers came to conferences and symposiums looking for insight and tools, such as Deploy Plus from Corona Solutions, to help them adjust and recalibrate when it comes to dynamic staffing challenges like high attrition, reduced budgets, and union demands.

Those insights included moving from thinking in shift averages to hourly averages for a more defensible, targeted approach to relieve specific pain points throughout the week in “Use Time Analysis to Recalibrate Patrol Staffing” at the:

  • AACA Spring Symposium (Arizona Association of Crime Analysts)
  • New England Crime Analysis & Intelligence Conference hosted by MACA (Massachusetts Association of Crime Analysts)
  • FCIAA Annual Conference (Florida Crime and Intelligence Analyst Association)
  • National Sheriff’s Association Annual Conference
National Sheriff’s Association 2022 Annual Conference – Kansas City

Insights also included which metrics are important to use and the best way to measure them for effective patrol staffing during “Ease the Pain of Attrition Through Patrol Staff Recalibration” at the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Public Safety Symposium in Albany, NY.

NYS Division of Criminal Justice 2022 Public Safety Symposium – Albany

While staffing woes continue to increase, it was saddening to see the collapse of the IALEP (International Association of Law Enforcement Planners) in 2022. These are the professionals tasked with staffing analysis if agencies are fortunate enough to employ them. With dwindling support and membership, the IALEP felt there wasn’t enough interest to continue. So, what is the future of staffing analysis for law enforcement agencies? There’s certainly a need for it based on the interest of the conference and symposium attendees. In April, the presentation “Ease the Pain of Attrition Through Patrol Staff Recalibration” will be given at the 2023 NORCAN Training Conference (Northwest Regional Crime Analysis Network).

Thorough patrol staffing analysis takes a lot of time and isn’t easy. There are no common off-the-shelf tools to which analysts and planners can turn that answer the hard questions: How can we effectively manage demand for service with decreasing staff? Will changing to a 12-hour schedule make officer workload better or worse? How much will response times be impacted when the next 10 officers leave?

Patrol is the biggest part of an agency’s budget (less a jail). It’s the division that most feels the impact of attrition, and it’s the most scrutinized of any department. Staffing to demand will not be answered by looking at a one-time snapshot in time, as demand is changing too fast, and historical workload was interrupted by COVID. The ability to adjust and recalibrate is crucial for an agency to run its patrol division smartly and efficiently. The way both the communities and the cops deserve.

To learn more information about new tools for demand-driven deployment, click here.

12’s May Not Be the Solution You Think

Fewer and fewer people are signing up to be in law enforcement. The remaining officers are working so many hours that burnout is exacerbating the attrition problem. Agencies think the only way to solve the problem is to enact a 12-hour shift pattern. This is an inefficient solution to decreased staffing.

Is attrition impacting patrol staff numbers? Are you operating with fewer patrol staff numbers than you have allocated? Is overtime in patrol increasing?

When I asked my audience of law enforcement command staff if these statements applied to their agency, a room full of hands went up. When asked what they were doing to solve the problem, many said they were moving to 12-hour shifts. That’s unfortunate, I told them. You’re overstaffing too many hours, to which I received puzzling looks. Let me explain…

Attrition, staffing woes, and officer burnout are terms you don’t have to look hard to find in the news about law enforcement agencies these days. Attrition is higher now than what agencies have been accustomed to. Fewer and fewer people are signing up to be in law enforcement. The remaining officers are working so many hours that burnout is exacerbating the attrition problem. Agencies may think the only way to solve the problem is to enact a 12-hour shift pattern. This is an inefficient solution to decreased staffing.

The most efficient staffing would see the number of officers working each hour proportionate to the demand for that hour. Demand for service changes each hour, and every day is different. So, in a perfect world, we would schedule a different number of officers every hour. For the agency represented below, you can see how the same hour on different weekdays requires a vastly different number of officers to optimally meet demand. For example, 14:00-15:00 on Monday needs 29 officers, while the same hour on Saturday and Sunday only needs 23. That particular hour on Monday has more traffic-related activity than the weekend does, which means more accidents. Accidents are one of the most frequent calls that officers respond to, and they usually take multiple officers to handle and are quite time-consuming.

Deploy Application – taken from an actual agency schedule

We don’t live in a perfect world, so we can’t schedule officers by the hour, but we can try to get as close as possible. The shorter the shift, the closer we can get. The longer the shift, the further we are from optimal allocation. That makes 12’s the furthest from optimal allocation.

One of the issues with 12’s is the shift overlap. Let’s pretend we have one shift that works 06:00-18:00 and the other works 18:00-06:00. Officers don’t end their shift on time because they’re covering the street while the next shift is gearing up. This is especially true during the 18:00 hour, one of the busier hours for most agencies. This turns a 12-hour shift into a 13 or 14-hour shift. Stack those 13 and 14-hour shifts on top of each other, resulting in a team full of fatigued officers. There are myriad issues related to operating with a staff full of fatigued officers, but that’s for a future blog post. Suffice it to say that the problems lying in wait (to quote Gordon Graham) are sizeable.

Well then, Lori, what if we used cover teams for the shift overlaps? OK, I say, are you going to have four shifts? A cover shift for each of the overlaps would require four shifts. Let’s pretend we add a 05:00 – 17:00 and a 17:00 – 05:00 team. So, you’re going to schedule officers to work 12 hours to cover two 1-hour gaps, one at 06:00 and the other at 18:00. Increasing the number of officers during the busier hours, usually until 20:00 during the week, is great. Still, now we’ve overstaffed the remaining hours. When the number of available officers is low, the last thing we should be doing is overstaffing.

More commonly than not, when 12-hour shifts are enacted, a rotation is added, so officers get some weekends off. This causes yet another inefficiency. To adequately staff the busier nights of the week, such as Friday and Saturday, you’ll have to bump up the staffing. Now, you have enough to cover those busy nights, but on the not-so-busy nights, you’ve got too many officers, and once again, we’re back to overstaffing. The demand follows a weekly pattern, and so should your schedule.

Finding the best schedule and allocation, with dwindling resources, is not an easy task. Follow our blog posts as we continue to discuss these topics and for further information, click here.

How Do You Really Know How Many Cops You Need?

The key is to know exactly which elements you need, how to scrutinize and clean that data, how to organize it, and most importantly how to apply it.

Law enforcement is now a data-driven profession, forcing agencies to provide statistically-defensible articulation for how many patrol officers are needed to maintain or reach specific goals such as emergency response times or backup unit availability.

This is quickly becoming a hot-button issue, and we are witnessing a collision between politics and demand. If demand dictates more officers, is the area then being over-policed? There is a struggle between officer safety and budgets, and sometimes there simply is no more money to spend. Some officers working the street may feel their safety is being disregarded and they are being taken for granted while others may think everything is great. That’s the byproduct of an imbalanced workload. Then there’s the issue of minimum staffing. An ambiguous number that becomes cemented in the agency culture. We can all agree that there needs to be a certain number of officers on duty, but what is the basis for that number? Is it by shift? Is it by the hour, so the minimum can be met by different shifts?

Even if an agency had all of the officers they’re allocated, there could still be an imbalance in the workload. Officers could struggle to keep up during certain hours while at other hours officers don’t run call-to-call. That’s the byproduct of an inefficient schedule. It’s nearly impossible to consider all of these factors and come up with a patrol schedule and deployment plan that feels perfect for everyone. So, how do we find a defensible and agreeable plan to move forward? What is the best way?

The answer lies in the first paragraph of this blog post…. a DATA-DRIVEN solution. Upfront, everyone needs to know that they won’t get exactly what they want. This means the community, the officers, the command staff, the purse-string holders, and anyone else who thinks they know the right answer.

It’s hard to argue with numbers and when those numbers are shown to everyone, they become fact. It’s important to be transparent in how these numbers were derived. Once, during my years as an analyst, there was a neighborhood that felt neglected by the police department. They claimed they never saw the police patrol their neighborhood, even as they had high crime and drive-by shootings every weekend. Wow, I thought, we’ve really dropped the ball with these guys. Guess I better see what they’re talking about. I did my analyst thing, pulled the data, cleaned the data, and gathered additional data just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Where was this high crime they spoke of? Drive-by shootings, surely we’d have records? The data was succinct. Low crime, and no drive-by shootings. Did they have crime, sure, but it was minimal in comparison to other neighborhoods. We sympathized with their perception that they were neglected by the police. But, when we showed them (with DATA) that we really need to spend our time in the neighborhoods that had higher crime and we couldn’t justify pulling cops from high crime areas where they are needed more, they actually agreed! They didn’t come away with what they wanted but were satisfied with the reason why.

The same solution applies to patrol staffing. There’s a plethora of data available to do this, specifically within CAD. The key is to know exactly which elements you need, how to scrutinize and clean that data, how to organize it, and most importantly how to apply it.

Interested in learning more about the most efficient way available to deploy our patrol officers? Click here

The Need to Recalibrate Staffing as Attrition Rises and Recruits Dwindle

Assuming there was no other option, many agencies moved to 12-hour patrol shifts, thinking that was the only way to maintain minimum, or close to minimum, staffing levels.

To say that workloads have changed for patrol officers in the recent past is an understatement. For some, pandemic shutdowns altered which calls officers respond to in-person and temporarily decreased the day-to-day workload. Then more serious resource-intensive calls related to violent crime started creeping up. When the shutdowns lifted, society was anxious to get moving again. As all of this happened, law enforcement officers reevaluated their career choice and began leaving in droves. Agencies suddenly found their patrol ranks dangerously short-staffed.

Many responded by disbanding specialized units, pulling detectives out of investigations, and sending all warm bodies to cover patrol shifts. Assuming there was no other option, many agencies moved to 12-hour patrol shifts, thinking that was the only way to maintain minimum, or close to minimum, staffing levels.

48 officers on a 12-Hour schedule

It may seem like an intuitive move. However, inefficiencies can hide in 12-hour shift schedules. Either there is no overlap between shifts and officers frequently get held over, or, if there are overlapping cover shifts, then too many hours become overstaffed.

The inefficiency of a 12-Hour schedule

Recruiting woes were being felt by law enforcement agencies even before the pandemic hit. Now recruiting is even more difficult and agencies are upping their game, offering hefty monetary incentives to attract the pale number of applicants.

Realistically, it will be a long while before recruiting catches up with attrition, if it ever does at all. In the meantime, robbing Peter to pay Paul is not sustainable. There’s a need for specialized units, now probably more than ever, and there has to be personnel dedicated to investigating and closing cases. Agencies need to ask themselves if they’re running patrol operations as efficiently as possible. Besides pulling bodies from other areas, what can agencies do to better staff patrol? The answer is to look at their SCHEDULE. Examining how patrol officers are deployed can uncover inefficiencies. By capitalizing on better deployment configurations, agencies can find a better fit between the number of officers they have and the workload their community demands.

48 officers on a 10-Hour schedule
More efficient 10-Hour schedule

Creating, changing, altering and adopting a patrol schedule requires computations on vast amounts of data. Utilizing this data, Corona Solutions harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to provide service projections based upon any given schedule. Deploy PlusTM from Corona Solutions provides detailed insight into patrol workload and the Deploy application. Visit our website to see how the value of this platform can work for your agency.

Maintaining Officer Safety in the Midst of Budget Cuts

Police budgets were fragile before nationwide calls to Defund the Police became loud and impossible for government leaders to ignore. This, along with the economic downturn due to COVID-19, is forcing police agencies to do more with less. So how do you maintain officer safety with the availability of backup assistance while your staffing numbers decrease?

Police budgets were fragile before nationwide calls to Defund the Police became loud and impossible for government leaders to ignore. The economic downturn resulting from the COVID-19 crisis hit local budgets hard and fast. Law enforcement agencies were already on track to lose money they thought the economy would provide. Money they were planning to use for hiring more officers and increasing pay amongst other things. Those plans fell apart when the Safer-at-Home orders began and the revenue needed to supply those funds dried up. Now the push to decrease police budgets and divert the funding away from law enforcement is being thrust upon city and county leaders. This is forcing law enforcement to run much leaner than they have in the past.

Most law enforcement agencies were placed on a hiring freeze when the COVID-19 pandemic started, impacting local budgets. Now, those vacancies have become permanent, at least for the foreseeable future. Vacancies in the sworn contingent of law enforcement agencies are immediately felt in patrol operations. Patrol is where new police officer hires are predominantly placed, filling holes created by attrition and the cascade of promotions and reassignments that occur when tenured officers depart.

Patrol operations not only feel the impact of short staffing before other parts of the agency do, but they also are most affected by officer safety matters. Having officers available to respond, when you need them the most, is paramount to officer safety.

So, how do you ensure availability to maintain officer safety and meet the workload demands of your community while your staffing number decreases?

To accomplish this you must employ an evidence-based approach, one that illustrates exactly what the impact of short staffing will have to your patrol operations. Using a data-driven process not only allows you to see exactly when officer safety vulnerability occurs, but it also allows you to transparently define those risks for stakeholders.

Below, an evidence-based approach is used to determine the number of patrol officers needed to secure officer safety. In this example, the agency size and workload dictate that four officers should always be available for backup assistance if needed. For this agency, 105 patrol officers are needed across the schedule to meet that requirement. However, if the agency only has 95 patrol officers to deploy across the schedule due to budget cuts, then the security of having four officers available for backup assistance decreases to only 80% of the time. With this data, stakeholders can make informed decisions with the knowledge of the associated risks with reduced staffing numbers

At the same time, the agency can see what happens to their response time goal by reducing their patrol staff. In this example, if the agency wanted to attain an average response time of 7.5 minutes to emergency calls 75% of the time, they would need 116 patrol officers. If the agency only had 95 officers, as in the above example, they would only be able to attain a 7.5 minute response time average to emergency calls 30% of the time. Again, this provides the agency, stakeholders, and community a transparent, data-driven method to evaluate the effects of reduced staffing on service expectations.

Sample Graphs from Deploy Plus depicting Operational Goal requirements

Whether it’s due to direct budget cuts or redirecting funds, police agencies will need to figure out how to safely deploy and provide effective services with leaner resources. Using data to drive deployment decisions is smart policing.

The Deploy Plus platform by Corona Solutions is the most economical way for agencies to provide this level of transparency and high-level, evidence-based decision making. Contact us today to find out how your agency can adequately staff for officer safety in the midst of budget cuts.