Author: Lori Frank

There’s No Time to Waste

Reduced staffing, budget cuts, personnel shortages… these are all terms floating around police command staff meetings these days. The writing on the wall indicates that there will be no new funding allocated toward police in the near future. Any federal money poured into Community Policing won’t materialize for a few years. Next year’s budgets are being negotiated and set, which include hiring freezes and even sworn layoffs. Police have always dealt with the “do more with less” mantra, but that is more real now than ever.

So, how can police departments maximize efficiency with minimal cost? Some of those answers lie in technology. There have been great technological advances that have helped departments run leaner and more efficient, such as online reporting and virtual police response. When there is no evidence to collect, no witnesses to canvas and interview, and no threat to mitigate, these pieces of technology allow officers more time for the calls that require an on-scene presence.

Many police agencies have already deployed these technological advances and still find the amount of time needed to maintain service has exceeded their capacity. Random or disproportional staffing is not going to cut it. Police need to squeeze every ounce of efficiency from their patrol operations so they don’t have to sacrifice their level of service or the community’s expectations.

To accomplish this, agencies need to be agile in their ability to staff and deploy patrol operations. What worked last year no longer works, and COVID shutdowns put a wrinkle in determining how busy the streets are these days. The solution requires continually monitoring changes in workload, looking for seepage in workload, and finding a way to buy back officers’ time.

Enormous gains can be made by employing proportional staffing methods, which result in the appropriate number of staff scheduled each hour of each day proportionate to the workload for that hour and day.

When they’re unable to gain officers, time is the only commodity left that agencies can hope to gain. Now more than ever, police agencies know there is no time to waste.

Proportional staffing, smart schedules, and buying back officer time is possible with the technological and analytical advances employed by Corona Solutions. Contact us to help squeeze the most time from your patrol schedule.

Who Will Respond in the Meantime?

Over the last few decades, policing has evolved to be the catchall for societal ills that were previously not considered to be law enforcement related. The amount of police resources spent on non-criminal activity has been creeping up over the years, requiring agencies to take on more responsibility and driving decisions regarding enforcement directives. On May 25, 2020, a historic fracture occurred in the direction policing will take in the future. How policing will look moving forward remains to be seen. Demands appear to center around redirecting response of non-criminal events to entities other than the police.

If police will no longer be responsible for dealing with non-criminal activity, you won’t find many police agencies complain, but diverting that response is going to be like turning a cruise ship….. s l o w!

In the rush to defund police, many city leaders are becoming aware that there are no viable solutions for not having police services today. The future may see a host of community-based teams and trained personnel equipped to respond to non-criminal calls. We can all hope, right? In the meantime, it will likely continue to fall on police agencies to handle these non-criminal situations. But, how do agencies deliver these services whilst their budgets come under scrutiny and face cuts?

For police agencies to survive these cuts, they must quantify the resources required to respond to non-criminal calls, not only to protect their fragile budgets, but also to provide solid data for the next corp stepping up to take on that responsibility. How many co-responders, licensed social workers and therapists will communities need to hire? What days should they work? What hours should they work? Leaders will turn to police departments, those that have handled these crises, for answers. The smart thing for agencies to do right now is to start quantifying the services they provide the community and justifying the resources they currently need to defend their budget dollars.

Workload analyses consistently reveal that a large volume of patrol resources (including the number of officers that respond to calls, time spent by each officer on the calls, and ancillary patrol costs) are spent on non-criminal activities. Being homeless, transient or mentally ill is not a crime. However, calls that revolve around these circumstances are where the bulk of patrol resources continue being consumed. In the current era of policing, resource justification needs to be evidence-based. Police agencies need data to justify how much it costs in salary, benefits, equipment, and the like for non-criminal response. There’s a treasure trove of information that agencies can harness to justify the need for resources and help tell their stakeholders “don’t be so quick to cut our budget or here are the services we will no longer have the capacity to provide.”

With a detailed account of the resources they expend on non-criminal activity, police agencies can preserve budget dollars. Agencies can show stakeholders, including government leaders and the community, exactly what services, and how much of those services, their budget dollars are buying. If police agencies can’t justify how they are spending the money, the community is unlikely to give them any. In the below sample, the police agency can clearly illustrate how many non-criminal calls, how many officers responded to the calls, how much time each officer spent on the scene, and how much cumulative time was consumed (over 6,700 hours!) on just three non-criminal activities.

Sample analysis from Deploy Plus Report

While the future of policing is being hashed out amongst community leaders, there are still non-criminal events that need to be dealt with. The only entity currently able to handle these are the police. Presently there are no teams of trained personnel at the ready the next time a call is received about the person walking in and out of traffic talking to themself or the homeless camp that popped up behind a business overnight. Those calls will still land with the nearest police agency and, hopefully, there will be an available officer to send.

Deploy Plus by Corona Solutions easily and economically provides agencies with the tools to show stakeholders the exact services their budget dollars are buying. More importantly, it illustrates what services will be lost to budget cuts. Who will respond then?