So, how may cops do you need and where do you need them?

“Efficient and effective police officer staffing and scheduling should avoid speculation and assumptions about critical issues like personnel deployment. It should be based on data and stated organizational goals and objectives. We should not expect our policing experience and intuition to provide all the answers. This will be critical in the future as police agencies are increasingly asked to justify budgetary requests and there is community pressure to not over or under police the people the police are sworn to protect.” So writes FPI Fellow Brian Gray, a 30+ year veteran of the crime and intelligence world.

One of the most frequent questions police leaders are asked during budgetary discussions is how many cops they need to achieve public safety goals. In the past, many leaders used the “officer-per-thousand” formula. while this was easy to calculate, and simple to understand, it really had no bearing on how many police officers were needed to achieve an acceptable level of policing/public safety effectiveness. On our Resources page, we have included a copy of an article by FPI Fellow, and the first Director of the USDOJ Office of Community Policing Services (COPS Office) Joe Brann et al that debunks this belief. Officer-per-thousand formulas & other policing myths: A leadership model for better police police resource management, is as pertinent today as it was the day it was first published.

In his article Data-Driven Answers to Law Enforcement Staffing Considerations, Gray briefly describes his experience using Staffing Optimizer, an analytical application designed to help answer the questions of how many cops and agency needs and when and where they need them. To read the article, click here.