How Crucial is the Schedule to Staffing?

A patrol schedule that does not consider the demand for service when allocating officers will leak efficiency.

In the face of high attrition and low recruitment plaguing the law enforcement sector, the conversation frequently revolves around increasing hiring bonuses and bettering pay rates to attract and retain staff. But perhaps, there’s a pivotal solution that we’re missing – could an improved scheduling process better allocate existing resources, easing the workload for officers? In this blog post, we dive into the possibility of refining the current schedule as a tool to mitigate staffing challenges. We’ll consider how efficient resource use can become a game-changer in times of dwindling numbers and growing demands, and why we need to prioritize this often overlooked aspect of law enforcement administration.

Even if agencies could hire a plethora of cops today, those officers won’t be ready to work for many months to come. The training process is lengthy and, by the time those officers are ready, several more will have left the organization. Getting ahead of that cycle is next to impossible. In the meantime, the calls keep coming, and the demand is still heavy. No one wants overworked and burned-out officers responding to critical situations and, the more they burn out, the greater the chance they’ll quit. Longer hours and more overtime are dangerous and most certainly not sustainable. Efficient use of resources is more important now than ever.

There is efficiency hiding inside patrol schedules that few agencies are tapping into. To better understand this, let’s look through a lens we can all relate to.

There is a finite number of officers to deploy within an agency just as there is a finite amount of money we have within our budget. Each month we allocate proportional amounts of money to maintain a balanced life. We pay a mortgage or rent so that we have a place to live. We pay utilities so that we have electricity and heat. We allocate our available funds responsibly and efficiently.

If we didn’t allocate those funds responsibly, efficiently and proportionally, there would be consequences. If we paid the same amount of money to the mortgage company as we do to utilities, then we would lose our housing due to underpayment. Conversely, it would be wasteful to pay the utility company the same as we pay our mortgage company. The same applies to not allocating our patrol resources responsibly, efficiently and proportionally.

We are seeing those consequences play out with overworked and burned-out cops. If some officers are running from call to call while others are not feeling that pinch, then there’s inefficiency hiding in the schedule. The most efficient schedule allocates the number of officers proportional to the demand. Just like you allocate the appropriate amount of money proportional to the amount of the debt or bill, the same applies to patrol scheduling.

A patrol schedule that does not consider the demand for service when allocating officers will leak efficiency. This leakage can occur by the hour of the day or by the day of the week. For example, if you had 80 officers and 4 teams and wanted to equalize the span of control across all the teams, you could put 20 officers on each team. This seems fair and balanced. In addition, this schedule could rotate so that officers only worked every other weekend. The example below, which is very similar to a schedule configuration recently recommended in a staffing study for a large metropolitan agency by a different consulting company, assumes two 12-hour shifts per day, so there is no overlap between day shift and night shift.

This allocation treats every day the same and every hour the same. It assumes that the demand for service is the same every day and every hour. There is the same number of officers working Sunday evening between 17:00 – 19:00 as there are working Thursday evening between 17:00 – 19:00. While both periods are understaffed, according to the demand during those hours on those days, Thursday is severely understaffed.

Using a tool like Deploy, we can analyze exactly how suitable this schedule is given the demand recorded in the CAD system.

Sunday at 17:00 is understaffed by 8, and 18:00 is understaffed by 10
Thursday at 17:00 is understaffed by 15, and 18:00 is understaffed by 14

Officers working Sunday evening at 17:00 may feel a little busy, but the officers working Thursday at 17:00 will feel crushed by the demand. The short staffing is almost double Thursday than it is on Sunday.

But what if you could make the workload easier for all of the officers, no matter what day or hour they’re working? Let’s take the same number of officers, 80, and create a schedule that allocates the officers proportionately to the workload. We added some teams and adjusted the days they work and the hours they work. Not only did we alleviate the crushing understaffing hours, but we also incorporated training into the schedule, and each officer actually works fewer hours on the street than the previous schedule.

Sunday at 17:00 and 18:00 are now understaffed by only 2
Thursday at 17:00 and 18:00 are now only understaffed by 4

In conclusion, the significance of an efficient patrol schedule in dealing with staffing issues cannot be overstated. Demand-driven deployment paves the way for balanced workloads, even in scenarios of high attrition and short-staffing. By harnessing the power of smart scheduling, we can alleviate the pressures on our law enforcement officers, making their jobs manageable and reducing the burnout rate. This strategy goes beyond merely filling vacancies; it’s about making the most of the resources at hand to ensure the safety and well-being of our officers and the communities they serve.

For more insights into our innovative solutions addressing staffing concerns, follow this link. Let’s rethink scheduling as we know it and embrace a future of more efficient law enforcement operations.

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.

Counting Calls vs. Counting Time

The most valuable resource that patrol officers possess is time, so how should it be measured?

Many decisions about staffing, allocation, and scheduling are made primarily on the CFS (Calls for Service) counts, and if time spent is included it is usually a generalized number across all CFS events. You’ve likely read something like “the average CFS took 18:41 to complete”. This is a very broad brush to apply when looking at resource consumption, and won’t provide the data needed to match your resource to your demand.

The most valuable resource that patrol officers possess is time. Time to respond and handle calls when citizens need help. Time to proactively engage their community. Time to write reports and take care of the day-to-day business. Time to collect information and investigate. Time to attend training and gain the most recent skills and knowledge available. So, when it comes to measuring this most valuable resource, how should it be done?

Average number of hours spent per officer per year

Adding up the time spent on CFS may seem straightforward, but the actual resource consumption is more complicated. It is not just looking at the time elapsed from the time of arrival to the time the call is clear. What if multiple officers respond? What if officers return to the call later? Each CFS is not equal and should not be treated as such.

Take for example a shoplifting call at your local big box store. One officer can typically handle a shoplifting call in about 30 minutes. Now, let’s look at a disturbance call outside a bar in a crowded entertainment center of town. One officer is not sufficient for this call, rather four officers are needed and it will take much longer than 30 minutes, probably one hour or more, to handle. So, while each call gets one tally in the count column, the time spent is vastly different; 30 minutes compared to four hours (4 officers @ 1 hour each = 4 hours). Time should not be seen as linear, rather it should be viewed as stacked.

Correct measurement of consumed time on calls per unit.

What if officers make multiple trips to the same call? For example, they clear the call but need to speak with the parties again later. Each instance of work on the call needs to be calculated so the true demand can be captured. Measuring from the first on-scene to the last clear would greatly inflate the time spent on the call. In the sample below, the actual time spent on the call was less than 2 hours, yet the first arrival to the last clear adds up to over 5 hours and would be an inaccurate measurement of resource demand.

Click here to see how the Deploy PlusTM platform from Corona Solutions rigorously measures demand so the appropriate resources can be scheduled for each hour of each day.

Impacts of Attrition and Juggling the Work Left Behind

In recent years law enforcement is being asked to “do more with less,” and at the same time, more and more societal ills are falling to the police for solving. But, bandwidth is shrinking and the workload is expanding, stretching resources so thin that the slightest extra tension could collapse the entire system.

At the same time, policing is experiencing a mass exodus of seasoned officers, and few recruits are ready to step in to take their place. The institutional knowledge walking out the door is going to take years to rebuild. Recruiting woes were the topic of discussion amongst law enforcement leaders long before the current staffing crisis, and things just got worse.

The Deploy Plus™ platform from Corona Solutions is the right tool to balance the workload and buy back officer time. The Deploy™ web application helps find the best allocation and schedule to prevent burnout amongst officers and empowers quick adaptation as workload and personnel change.

Redistributed, more equitable and balanced workload

There are no simple or short resolutions to recruiting and training when it takes 18 – 24 months to put an officer in a car answering calls on their own. Even if agencies are fortunate enough to over-hire in anticipation of attrition rates, the line of recruits waiting to get in is far shorter than it used to be. And, while hiring practices and standards are being evaluated, adjusted, modified, and revised to get more diverse bodies in the door, the work left to do has not subsided.

High saturation levels per officer

Continuing to use overtime to fill shifts is not sustainable. Officers will burn out from constantly running call-to-call, no backup units will be there when needed, and the overtime budget will explode.

When you can’t add cops, the only way to buy back officer time is to maximize the efficiency of your deployment of officers. An evidence-based approach can redistribute the workload across the remaining staff which will be more equitable, safer, and economical.

Click here to learn how Deploy Plus can help.

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.