International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 9 Number 4

Place, Jerry (2007) Evaluating Police Department Policy Decisions Using a Simulation Model of Sworn Officer Deployment.
International Journal of Police Science & Management, volumen 9, número 4. Thousand Oaks, California, Estados Unidos.
Sage Publications. Páginas 341 a 356.

Evaluating police department policy

decisions using a simulation model of
sworn officer deployment

Jerry Place
School of Computing and Engineering, University of Missouri — Kansas City,
570J Flarsheim Hall, Kansas City, MO 64110, USA. Email: placej@umkc.edu
Received 21 July 2006; accepted 11 December 2006
Keywords: simulation models, police manpower planning, police
deployment

Jerry Place received a BBA from the University INTRODUCTION

of Missouri—Kansas City in 1972, an MBA from
the University of Missouri—Kansas City in 1974,
an MS in Computer Science from the University
of Kansas in 1979 and a PhD in Computer Sci-
ence from the University of Kansas in 1984. Dr.
Place is a founding faculty member of the Com-
puter Science program at the University of
Missouri—Kansas City where he is an Associate
Professor of Computer Science. His current
research interests include modeling and simula-
tion of computer and communications systems,
optical networking and numerical methods.
ABSTRACT
In this paper we describe a simulation model built
to study police manpower planning and schedul-
ing at the strategic level. The model was designed
to analyse current officer shift scheduling and to
report average response time for different classes of
calls and utilisation of patrol officers. Since the
model produces officer utilisation, it could be used
as a planning tool supporting shift scheduling,
budgeting for new officers and supporting com-
munity policing efforts. We describe construction,
verification and validation and the parameters for
the model. We present results from a baseline
study and we show how our model could be used
to support several policy decisions about officer
utilisation and deployment.
Information technology (IT) is a key
enabler of problem-oriented policing as
enumerated by Herman Goldstein (Gold-
stein, 1990). Community-oriented policing
(COP) is an essential way to provide a
‘. . . systematic, thorough, insightful, dis-
criminating and honest . . . understanding
of the problems . . .’ which sworn officers
face (Scott, 2000). Effective COP depends
heavily on extensive IT support for applica-
tions, data, analysis and presentation (Asso-
ciates, 2000).
Extensive studies have been directed at
effective IT analysis of crime data to pro-
vide insight into problems faced by law
enforcement agencies; however, little work
has been done to provide strategic decision-
making support based on these analyses to
be used for manpower planning and budget
development.
In this paper we focus on an IT applica-
tion that can be used strategically to organ-
ise and schedule sworn officers and which
will support the evaluation of policy deci-
sions on these schedules.
BACKGROUND International Journal of Police
Science and Management,
Police and city officials commissioned a Vol. 9 No. 4, 2007, pp. 341–356.
© Vathek Publishing,
detailed quantitative analysis of police 1461–3557

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Evaluating police department policy decisions
workload. They wanted to know how
sworn officers spent their shift time. Police
officials wanted to commit more officer
time to COP but before those commit-
ments could be formalised, a thorough
understanding of current duties was essen-
tial. This study showed that officer work-
load was very high measured by the time
spent answering calls for immediate service,
eg 911 emergency calls. This measure was
particularly important because department
officials had set a goal that no more than 35
per cent of an officer’s workload would be
committed to answering calls for service,
with the balance of shift time dedicated to
COP.
From Figure 1 it can be seen that officers
in the five divisions of the Patrol Bureau —
Central, Metro, East, North and South —
spent much more than the goal of 35 per
cent of their time answering calls for ser-
vice. In several observation periods, over 60
per cent of the average officer’s shift time
was spent responding to calls for service.
Also, Figure 1 indicates that the patrol force
Figure 1
Average committed time
percentage for all
divisions
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deployment does not appear to be balanced
across patrol divisions — some patrol divi-
sions provide better service than others sim-
ply because the resources allocated to those
divisions resulted in less time spent in hand-
ling calls.
Also of serious concern to officials and to
the general public were the times when no
officers within a division were available to
answer calls. These periods were unfortu-
nately named ‘blackouts’ by the press when
the study was released. The study indicated
that blackouts occurred in every division
and on almost every day in the week.
Motivated by problem areas highlighted
by their quantitative study, but also con-
cerned by the lack of quantitative support
for strategic manpower planning, police and
city officials jointly commissioned the
development of a simulation model of
sworn officer deployment called the Police
Deployment Model (PDM). The PDM was
commissioned to support both tactical day-
to-day officer scheduling as well as strategic
analysis of future manpower requirements.

Specific objectives developed by police
and city officials for the PDM were:
● tactical planning support for the reduc-
tion of officer shift time answering calls
for service. Police officials established a
goal of reducing officer shift time spent
answering calls for service to no more
35 per cent. Remaining shift time was
to be spent interacting with citizens in
the division with the primary objective
of reducing criminal and anti-social
activity;
● tactical planning support directed to
reduce blackout;
● strategic planning support directed
toward estimating future manpower
needs; and
● estimating the budget requirements for
these needs.
In the following sections of this paper we
describe the Patrol Bureau organisation
which the model was designed to support.
We also describe the Police Deployment
Model and its parameters. We go on to
present the model baseline and validate that
study and we describe several proposed
strategic policy decisions about police
deployment and use the Police Deployment
Model to analyse these policy changes. The
final section presents our conclusions.
PATROL BUREAU ORGANISATION
The Police Department Patrol Bureau pro-
vides service to the public primarily by
responding to calls for service; by patrolling
assigned areas; and by conducting commun-
ity policing through special units that
include community action network centres,
community action teams and foot patrols.
More than two-thirds of the police
department’s law enforcement positions are
assigned to the Patrol Bureau. Police
officers are assigned to regular patrol duties,
community policing activities and other
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Place
functions such as crime analysis and preven-
tion. Sergeants supervise patrol officers in
the field and perform administrative and
supervisory duties in the patrol stations.
Captains serve as watch commanders, one
per division for each of the three shifts. A
major commands each patrol station.
The number of patrol officers on duty
varies by time of day and day of the week.
More officers are added in the evening
through Rapid Response Teams. Patrol
officers work eight-hour shifts and about
1.6 officers are needed for each on-duty
position to allow for days off, vacations, sick
leave and court appointments. The depart-
ment’s patrol deployment plan called for
263 patrol officers with about one-third
scheduled each shift.
Dispatchers classify 911 calls for service
and then dispatch units to handle calls that
require a police response: the dispatch unit
is the police car. Dispatchers classify calls by
type and assign a four-digit code to the call.
The number of units dispatched to the call
depends on the call type. Call types and the
standard number of cars to dispatch are
shown in Table 1. However, this number
varies from division to division.
Dispatchers use a computer-aided dis-
patch system to maintain information on
activities. Among the data items recorded
for each incident are:
● date/time call received;
● phone number call received from;
● count of cars dispatched to call;
● time that car was dispatched and subse-
quently returned to patrol service for
each car dispatched to call;
● call code;
● location of the incident.
POLICE DEPLOYMENT MODEL
Earlier modelling work
Analytic and simulation models have been
used extensively to support strategic police
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Evaluating police department policy decisions
Table 1: Call class priorities
Priority Description
1 assist officer
2 immediate response, life threatening
3 immediate response, not life
threatening
4 delayed response
administration. Larson (1972) describes the
use of M/M/m queueing models: models
with Markovian (Poisson) arrival and ser-
vice distributions and m servers to deter-
mine, given a desired response delay, the
number of cars to dispatch to calls for
service.
Several self-contained simulations were
developed and made available to police
agencies in the 1970s and 1980s. The Rand
Corporation designed the Patrol Car Allo-
cation Model (PCAM) as a self-contained
FORTRAN program for determining the
number of patrol cars that should be on
duty at various times of the day in each
geographical area of a city (Chaiken &
Dormont, 1975a, 1975c, 1975b) and the
work is summarised by Chaiken and
Dormont (1978). Another published model
was created for a subdivision of the greater
Manchester area in Great Britain (Freeman,
1992) using the programming language
SMALLTALK. The author studied 29 dif-
ferent activities related to crime and other
events such as serious traffic accidents.
Simulation systems are widely available
and run effectively and efficiently on com-
modity hardware. Systems such as ARENA
(Kelton, Sadowski, & Sturrock, 2004) are
inexpensive and straightforward to use. We
built the PDM using a low-cost system
called CSIM (Schwetman, 1996) running
under the Linux operating system. Our
simulation software is readily available and
inexpensive, USD1,000 for a site licence,
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Example Units disp.
assist an officer 3
armed robbery, shooting 2
purse snatch 1
noise disturbance
and Linux could be used to tailor a simula-
tion for the specific needs of decision-
makers at a reasonable cost.
The PDM simulation model
The police deployment model was devel-
oped using a process-resource simulation
(Law & Kelton, 2000). In a process-
resource simulation, ‘events’ are written as
self-contained software processes in the
simulation programming language. Our
model supports four classes of calls for ser-
vice and these service calls are implemented
as distinct processes initiated according to
call statistics developed from dispatching
records.
Simulation resources are dispatchable
units, ie cars with police officers. Resources
are allocated to processes on a modified
first-come-first-served basis. If no cars are
available for dispatch, class 1 and 2 calls are
queued while class 3 and 4 calls are blocked
and cleared: these lower priority calls are
not queued for service. Resources are allo-
cated to queued calls based on class: all class
1 calls are dispatched before any class 2 calls,
then queued class 2 calls are dispatched
before any class 3, and so on.
A 911 call for service is simulated by
starting an instantiation of the simulation
process corresponding to the class of the
call. The call process reserves resources,
police officers, and holds them for the
duration of the call. When the call is
resolved, the allocated police officers are
returned to the resource pool. If no officers

Figure 2: Process–resource simulation model
are available for dispatch — they are all
allocated to other calls for service — the
call is either queued FCFS, by class, for the
first available officer or it is blocked and
cleared. Thus, many call processes may be
active concurrently in the simulation model
with each process holding some resources
until the call it represents has been resolved.
A general process-resource model of police
dispatching with four call classes is shown in
Figure 2.
Call processes have different attributes
such as the number of cars dispatched and
the average time required for officers to
resolve the call. Most call parameters are
themselves random variables generated from
a joint distribution depending on call class.
Additionally, call attributes vary for each
hour of the 24-hour day and they are
different for each patrol division.
There are four classes of calls for service,
corresponding to the service classes shown
in Table 1. The four categories from Table 1
can be further grouped into immediate
response calls (IR), comprising class 1 and
class 2, and delayed response calls (DR),
comprising class 3 and class 4.
Model input is an officer shift schedule as
shown in Table 2. The table presents unit
and officer staffing, average call inter-arrival
and call service times for each call class over
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Place
a typical 24-hour day for the Metro Divi-
sion. Similar schedules existed for each of
the other divisions. Units available for dis-
patch correspond to the staffing schedule.
For example, at 16.00 in the Metro division
there are 23 mobile units available to dis-
patch to calls for service with 23 officers
scheduled: note that a few cars carry two
officers, however, most units carry one
officer. These officers are not only expected
to answer calls for service, they are also
expected to interact with citizens in their
patrol division and to engage in various
anti-crime activities. These call statistics
were developed from statistically reducing
call dispatching records, and these funda-
mental data elements used to develop para-
meters for the PDM model.
Scheduling drivers create call process as
random events based on the input mean call
arrival rates as shown in Table 2. For exam-
ple, from midnight to 1.00, the average
time between class 1 calls in the Metro
Division is 6.5 minutes, thus the call inter-
arrival time is assumed to be a random
variable (rv) with an average of 6.5 minutes.
The average time required to resolve a class
1 call during this same period is 26.8 min-
utes, thus call service time is considered to
be an exponentially distributed rv with an
average of 28 minutes. Thus call driver
processes will generate a class 1 call on
average every 6.5 minutes and the call will
require on average 28 minutes to resolve.
The simulation clock starts at midnight and
runs for 24 hours and, for every hour of the
day, the set of attributes for the simulation
changes according to the input schedule
supplied to the model.
As calls for service are randomly gen-
erated by the model based on supplied
parameters, officers are dispatched to ser-
vice the call. If a dispatchable unit is avail-
able (on patrol), it is dispatched to the call
and is unavailable for other assignment for
the time required to service the call — also
generated randomly by the model based on
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Table 2: Metro Division on-duty staffing and average call inter-arrival and service
times by call class

Class 1 Class 2 Class 3 Class 4

Units Avg. Arr. Svc. Arr. Svc. Arr. Svc. Arr. Svc.
Hour sched. crew time time time time time time time time

0 18 21 6.5 26.8 126.9 50.9 20.8 43.2 38.7 33.9

1 18 21 6.5 34.9 126.1 56.7 30.7 45.2 19.4 32.2
2 18 21 8.8 36.2 180.8 45.0 29.8 43.9 22.3 33.6
3 17 19 13.4 31.0 154.9 51.5 32.8 41.3 29.5 33.5
4 17 19 14.8 29.6 176.9 38.5 27.6 47.4 34.7 34.8
5 17 18 17.6 26.6 144.6 63.7 25.4 53.1 33.0 25.1
6 13 14 17.9 32.9 310.6 46.5 40.5 42.9 66.7 17.7
7 13 13 10.7 26.7 109.5 60.3 29.4 35.6 64.2 30.4
8 15 15 9.2 26.7 94.5 80.2 15.4 79.6 61.9 38.8
9 15 15 7.8 28.5 63.2 59.0 27.6 57.8 57.7 23.3
10 15 15 7.9 30.9 90.9 63.9 23.0 45.4 45.2 31.6
11 15 15 7.5 32.6 77.3 71.9 28.7 45.6 56.0 31.2
12 15 15 7.0 31.9 63.3 67.1 38.0 67.7 55.3 43.4
13 15 15 6.1 28.5 78.5 50.3 29.3 39.0 61.2 32.7
14 13 14 5.8 28.4 108.7 55.6 18.0 49.1 96.2 42.5
15 16 18 5.4 29.9 66.7 59.6 10.9 37.6 36.7 24.2
16 23 26 4.9 32.7 64.5 53.7 17.2 48.7 16.0 30.9
17 23 26 4.6 30.3 65.4 64.1 21.5 29.2 15.3 30.5
18 23 26 4.6 34.3 69.3 60.6 23.5 48.4 14.8 32.6
19 24 28 4.7 31.0 72.4 78.5 23.8 42.2 17.1 33.2
20 24 28 5.0 32.5 117.3 63.6 20.5 37.9 14.5 29.6
21 23 27 4.4 28.3 115.5 42.0 22.9 27.6 19.6 35.2
22 18 21 4.9 28.7 95.1 63.7 19.0 22.0 28.3 25.4
23 16 19 5.7 28.6 111.3 47.3 20.7 28.9 31.0 23.8

supplied parameters. If there are no units
available for dispatch, IR calls wait in first-
come-first-served (FCFS) queues and calls
from the other call classes are blocked and
cleared, ie not answered and thus lost. As
the simulation proceeds through the
24-hour day, statistics are collected about
the number of units available to answer calls
and the queue time for those calls, ie the
time that elapses until officers can be dis-
patched to handle the call. Additionally, the
percentage of uncommitted time, officer
utilisation, is also computed. This is an
important measure as a major goal of the
police department is for an officer to spend
no more than 35 per cent of the duty day
answering calls for service.
Model output includes the average num-
ber of officers available for dispatch as well
as the percentage of each officer’s shift spent
answering calls. The average queue length
for class 1 and class 2 calls is also presented
as the average period between the time a
call is taken and when officers are dis-
patched to the call. Officer response time is
call queue time plus drive time. The PDM
also counts class 3 and class 4 calls that were
blocked and cleared.
Table 2 presents inputs supplied to guide
PDM execution. For each hour of the day,

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the units available for dispatch are shown that simulation results are statistically in
along with average call inter-arrival and accordance with specified model control
service times in minutes for each job class. parameters.
Also in Table 2 can be seen average call
inter-arrival and service times for each hour
of the average duty day, eg at 16.00 the MODEL BASELINE STUDY
average call inter-arrival time is 4.9 minutes
and the average service time is 32.7 minutes Model verification
for class 1 calls. Thus officers dispatched to Model verification is the process of ensur-
an IR call during this hour will be unavail- ing that the model code is correct and that
able for other assignments for an average of events that transpire in the model are con-
32.7 minutes. sistent with model design attributes. Model
Additional parameters are available for verification was a continuous process dur-
each division specifying the distribution of ing PDM development. Model code was
units dispatched to each call by call class. verified to be syntactically correct as well as
Unit distribution for the Metro Division is to represent the stated function of the
shown in Table 3. When officers are dis- underlying system being modelled.
patched to a class 1 call, 31 per cent of the
time one unit is dispatched; 47 per cent of Model validation
the time two units are dispatched and so on. PDM model validation differed from the
Clearly, there is no ‘steady state’ for our usual model validation techniques. Since
model because model parameters change the police department cannot ignore emer-
every hour, simulation runs were conducted gency 911 calls, when officers are unavail-
for 60 ‘days’ and the performance statistics able for dispatch, extraordinary measures are
for each ‘day’ were then averaged either by used, eg sergeants are dispatched, officers
hour or by shift depending on the perform- are ‘pre-empted’ from lower priority calls,
ance metric. This is called the batched etc. Since the purpose of the model was to
means technique (Law & Kelton, 2000) study the impact of change at the policy
and is a recognised mechanism to ensure level on blackout and officer availability
rather than to replicate the dispatching
process, extraordinary dispatching measures
Table 3: Distribution of units dispatched were not built in. The model was designed
for each call by call class for the Metro to represent a true stochastic process. Thus
Division we validated the model using the ‘validate
by eyeball’ process (Law & Kelton, 2000,
No. Class 1 Class 2 Class 3 Class 4 p. 347). As the basis for validation of the
units calls calls calls calls PDM, we selected a time frame that
included significant blackout periods.
1 31.0% 85.2% 90.1% 63.3% We ran the simulation with the baseline
2 47.0% 11.7% 7.8% 24.0%
3 15.2% 2.7% 1.3% 7.3%
parameters and examined the number of
4 5.4% 0.2% 0.6% 2.8% officers available to be dispatched for calls.
5 1.0% 0.0% 0.2% 1.7% Figure 3 compares officer availability for
6 0.3% 0.2% 0.0% 0.3% shift 2 over an average day from the simula-
7 0.1% 0.0% 0.0% 0.6% tion model and officers available deter-
8 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
mined from dispatching records noted as
9 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
10 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% ‘observed’ in the plot. The notion of shift
as used here is just a way to divide the

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Evaluating police department policy decisions
Figure 3
PDM distribution vs.
observed distribution of
units available for
dispatch for the Metro
Division for shift 2
24-hour day into three equal size units.
Shift 1 is from 0.00 until 8.00; shift 2 is
from 8.00 until 16.00; and shift 3 is from
16.00 until 0.00. Actual work hours for
officers may start at any time and are called
tours of duty and do not conform with the
notion of shift as used here. The error bars
on the simulation results are ±1.5 per cent.
Clearly, in most instances simulation results
compare favourably with actual values, even
though the simulation study does not pre-
empt officers for dispatch to critical calls
nor does the simulation model take the
availability of supervisory personnel into
consideration.
Since the PDM distribution of units
available for dispatch is ‘numerically close’
to the actual distribution of units available
for dispatch and since the two distributions
have the same shape, we consider the PDM
to be a valid model of dispatching officers
to calls for service. We did not use tradi-
tional statistical techniques, ie t tests, to
compare the two distributions because we
felt that such tests would be misleading. A
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successful t test would imply precision that
was not present. Dispatching records were
often incomplete and error prone.
Some example policy questions
supported by the PDM
We used the PDM to measure performance
changes resulting from several contemplated
policy changes. We present examples of
how the model could be used to provide
quantitative support for policy decisions.
These examples also offer insight about
how the policy decisions might be trans-
lated into parameters for the model.
Baseline shift staffing schedule analysis
The first study presented here is an analysis
of patrol officer staffing. We used the PDM
to analyse current officer scheduling and
suggest scheduling modifications that might
reduce blackout with minimal new
resources.
If we look at the 10.00 to 16.00 period
from Figure 4, we see a steadily increasing
call arrival rate while unit staffing changes
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Figure 4
Baseline officer staffing
vs. class 1 call arrival
rate over the average
24-hour day for the
Metro Division

very little until just before 16.00. Another
factor in these figures is the total number of
units available over the shift. For the base-
line schedule of units (see Table 2), there is a
total of 469 man hours per day of which 36
per cent of shift 1; 52 per cent of shift 2;
and 60 per cent of shift 3 time is spent
answering calls. Tables 4 and 5 present the
response time distribution for class 1 calls
and the distribution of units available for
dispatch resulting from the execution of the
PDM with the original Metro staffing
schedule. From Table 4, 13 per cent of class
1 calls during shift 2 wait more than 5
minutes before a unit can be dispatched
while 1 per cent of the class 1 calls wait 25

Table 4: Probability distribution of Table 5: Probability distribution of units

response time for class 1 calls over the available for dispatch produced by PDM
three shifts of the average day produced with original Metro Division staffing
by the PDM for the Metro Division from schedule
the baseline staffing schedule
Shift 1 Shift 2 Shift 3
Resp tm Shift 1 Shift 2 Shift 3
0 6.8% 22.3% 22.0%
Under 5 min. 96% 87% 90% 1–3 16.6% 28.6% 26.3%
5–15 min. 4% 9% 9% 4–6 23.3% 24.2% 21.4%
15–25 min. 0% 3% 2% 7–9 25.9% 17.3% 16.5%
25–35 min. 0% 1% 0% 10–12 17.9% 6.6% 8.5%
35–45 min. 0% 0% 0% 13–15 6.9% 0.9% 3.5%
45–55 min. 0% 0% 0% 16–18 2.6% 0.1% 1.5%
Over 55 min. 0% 0% 0% Over 19 0.0% 0.0% 0.3%

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Evaluating police department policy decisions

Figure 5
Revised officer staffing
vs. IR call arrival rate
over the average 24-hour
day for the Metro
Division

to 35 minutes for a unit to be dispatched. these tables, it is clear that the new on-duty
From Table 5, 22 per cent of the time staffing schedule will dramatically reduce
during shift 2, there are no officers available blackout probability over shifts 2 and 3: on
to be dispatched to class 1 calls. shift 2 blackout probability was reduced
Suppose we want to estimate the impact from 22.3 per cent to 5.1 per cent and on
of a new staff scheduling policy on blackout shift 3 blackout probability was reduced
and call dispatch waiting time. We create a from 22 per cent to 6.6 per cent. Addition-
new on-duty staffing schedule so that more ally, at least 96 per cent of all class 1 calls can
officers are available over the 24-hour day be expected to be dispatched within five
and we better match the levels of on-duty minutes, across all shifts.
staffing to the arrival pattern of class 1 calls
in the division. Our revised on-duty staffing
schedule against class 1 call arrival rates is Table 6: Probability distribution by shift
presented in Figure 5. From 6.00 through with the revised Metro Division staffing
23.00, unit staffing closely follows the in- schedule
crease in call arrival rate. We then executed
the PDM simulation with the new staffing Shift 1 Shift 2 Shift 3
schedule for the original call arrival and
0 8.0% 5.1% 6.6%
service rates. 1–3 13.6% 12.4% 11.3%
The additional units available for dispatch 4–6 18.7% 19.3% 14.1%
and the more timely scheduling of units 7–9 20.1% 21.9% 17.4%
throughout the day produced an average 10–12 22.2% 20.0% 16.9%
distribution of units available for dispatch as 13–15 11.2% 12.9% 15.0%
16–18 4.3% 5.9% 10.5%
shown in Table 6 and class 1 call waiting Over 19 1.9% 2.3% 8.2%
time distribution as shown in Table 7. From

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to be first responders for these calls for

Table 7: Call response time probability frequent offenders — and their impact on
distribution by shift for the Metro staffing and reducing the average delay in
Division with the revised staffing responding to calls for service.
schedule While false alarm calls cannot be pre-
dicted before units are dispatched, they can
Resp tm Shift 1 Shift 2 Shift 3
be identified after the fact from their call
Under 5 min. 96% 98% 98% type in the call dispatching database. Thus,
5–15 min. 3% 2% 2% call arrival and service data were tabulated
15–25 min. 1% 0% 0% for false alarm calls and they were removed
25–35 min. 0% 0% 0% from the call database and performance data
35–45 min. 0% 0% 0% were adjusted to reflect the removal of these
45–55 min. 0% 0% 0%
Over 55 min. 0% 0% 0%
calls.
False alarms are not distributed evenly
over the 24-hour day. Figure 6 shows the
distribution of false alarms as a percentage
The new on-duty staffing schedule of total IR calls over the 24-hour day for
requires 522 man hours (ie increase in the Metro Division. It is clear that the bulk
staff × 8 hour shift per month) but only 35 of false alarm calls occurs between 8.00 and
per cent of officer time on shift 1, 41 per 10.00 and that in many cases this percentage
cent of officer time on shift 2, and 48 per is significant, ie 42 per cent of the calls for
cent of officer time on shift 3 are spent Metro around 8.00 were false alarms.
answering calls. Thus, not only do we Figure 7 summarises changes in Metro
reduce blackout but we also increase unit Division blackout probability over the three
uncommitted time with this policy deci- shifts of the average day as a percentage
sion. The new on-duty staffing schedule reduction of false alarm calls. From Figure
not only reduces key system performance 7, by eliminating all false alarm calls, shift 2
metrics but it allows officers to spend more and shift 3 blackout is reduced from more
time in other activities at a cost of 53 than 15 per cent to just under 12 per cent.
additional man hours per day over the ori- Thus, the ‘cost’ of responding to false
ginal schedule. Thus, the PDM allows us to alarms is a 3 per cent increase in blackout
estimate the cost of the policy decision in probability.
man hours and to evaluate the impact of the Clearly, false alarms cannot be deter-
policy decision on blackout and call dis- mined prior to responding to the call: how-
patch waiting time. ever, by identifying those calls in historical
data, the PDM allows policy decisions to be
Eliminating false alarm calls made based on a cost benefit analysis. With-
In this section we study the impact of false out the PDM, it would not be possible to
alarm calls on blackout probability. Police determine quantitative benefits that could
and city officials were interested in the occur if these calls were reduced.
impact of false alarms on blackout and
officer availability. While it is not possible to Eliminating non-injury traffic accident
determine that an alarm is false before the response
event, officials wanted to understand the At the time of this study, policy required
relationship better between policy decisions that all traffic accidents must be investigated
about false alarms — such as fines for repeat by a sworn officer. Officials were interested
offenders or requiring private security firms in evaluating the impact of eliminating calls

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Evaluating police department policy decisions

Figure 6
Distribution of false
alarm calls as a
percentage of all calls
over average day for the
Metro Division

Figure 7
Blackout reduction as a
result of eliminating a
percentage of false alarm
calls

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due to non-injury traffic accidents, ie
instead of using sworn officers to investigate
all traffic accidents, if there were no injuries
from the accident, allowing the parties to
exchange insurance information and to file
an accident report at their local police sta-
tion. Officials were interested in the effect
that this policy change would have on
officer availability and blackout.
Figure 8 shows the distribution of non-
injury accident response calls as a per-
centage of total calls. From Figure 8, we
note that these calls are not distributed
evenly over the 24-hour day, rather they
tend to clump during the morning and
evening rush hours. Also, the distribution of
these calls varies from division to division.
Non-injury traffic calls are a significant per-
centage of calls in the North Patrol Division
but much less significant in the Metro Divi-
sion, hence the impact on blackout prob-
ability will be uneven across districts.
As with false alarm calls, non-injury
accident calls were removed from the call
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Place
Figure 8
Distribution of Metro
Division non-injury
accident response calls
over average day
database and hourly mean call arrival and
service rates were recomputed for 0 per
cent through to 100 per cent elimination of
the calls and the PDM was executed for this
arrival/service rate combination. Figure 9
shows the impact on blackout probability
for shifts 1, 2 and 3 when these calls are
eliminated for the Metro Division.
While the elimination of these calls does
reduce blackout probability, the reduction is
small — blackout probability is reduced
from over 15 per cent with none of the
non-injury calls removed to just over 13 per
cent with all of these calls removed. Thus,
for the Metro Division, this policy change
would not have a significant impact either
on blackout or on officer utilisation.
Committed time reduction due to
staffing increases
Finally, officials were interested in deter-
mining the relationship between staffing
increases and average shift committed time,
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Evaluating police department policy decisions

Figure 9
Blackout probability
reduction due to
elimination of non-injury
accident response calls

Figure 10
PDM analysis of officer
committed time
percentage as officers
are added to staffing
schedule for the Metro
Division

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ie the average time spent answering calls for
service. Department officials wanted a
sworn officer staffing level in each division
of the Patrol Bureau that would require the
average officer to spend no more than 35
per cent of his or her shift time answering
calls for service. A call-time utilisation ceil-
ing of 35 per cent was a department goal, to
allow officers to spend the majority of their
shift time in community policing activities.
Thus the PDM was used to analyse shift
staffing levels against officer call time for the
average day in each patrol division. For this
analysis, we increased the number of offi-
cers assigned to each shift by one from zero
through to twenty and executed the PDM
for each staffing level increment. Figure 10
summarises the output from these simula-
tion studies for the Metro Division. This
figure provides police and city officials with
a quantitative way to estimate the cost of,
for example, attaining community policing
goals of average committed time of 35 per
cent.
From Figure 10, to reach average com-
mitted time of 35 per cent during shift 3 for
the Metro Division, about 11 or 12 addi-
tional officers must be added, while 6 or 7
additional officers will bring the Metro
Division under the 35 per cent committed-
time goal for shift 2. No additional officers
were required for shift 1 of the Metro
Division. For the entire city — across all
patrol divisions — the PDM indicated that
about 117 new officers would be required
to meet the 35 per cent maximum
committed-time goal.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, we described our Police
Deployment Model (PDM). The model
allows police and city officials to evaluate
police policy decisions quantitatively. The
PDM will allow planners to quantify broad
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performance goals such as no longer requir-
ing patrol officers to respond to intrusion
alarms or no longer requiring patrol officers
to respond to non-injury traffic accidents.
The PDM is a strategic planning tool
that allows policy-makers to evaluate the
impact of their policy initiatives quantitat-
ively in terms of officer staffing levels. The
tool is fairly easy to use with input prepared
from an Excel spreadsheet. Model output is
organised for graphical presentation from
several plotting tools including Excel.
We believe that the PDM is a powerful
tool that will enable planners to establish
broad performance goals within known
budget constraints, or to establish budgets
that are capable of supporting a specified
broad performance objective.
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