Green Bay Police Department Staffing Analysis

The engagement

What We Did

The Center for Public Safety was retained by the City of Green Bay and Berners Schober Architects to analyze the staffing of the Green Bay Police Department and to compare it against departments operating under similar conditions. CPS identified more than twenty candidate agencies in Wisconsin and neighboring states, issued a structured information request to each, and obtained complete comparable data from eight Wisconsin departments: Beloit, Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, New Berlin, Oshkosh, Wausau, Wauwatosa, and West Allis. Those eight formed the comparison set, and CPS built matrices from them covering personnel allocation, job responsibilities, operational structure, and service delivery model, noting throughout where a difference in call taking, dispatch, booking, or community outreach made a raw comparison misleading.

The staffing requirement itself was computed from Green Bay’s own workload rather than from the comparison set. Working from the 71,382 emergency calls for service the department handled in 2022, CPS applied an average handling time, added the established allowance for report writing, training, relief, vehicle servicing, supervision, and preventive patrol, divided by the hours needed to staff one patrol element for a year, and then applied an availability factor of 2.20 derived from 1,658 actual duty hours per officer. The computation returned a requirement of 97 patrol officers, a figure covering patrol alone and excluding the chief, command staff, and all sworn personnel assigned elsewhere. Investigative staffing was modeled separately from available case hours per detective, 1,248 hours against an average of ten hours per case, giving a sustainable caseload of 124 cases per detective against the sixteen detectives then working cases.

The comparison set served as the check on that conclusion rather than the basis for it. CPS closed by recommending that the city commission a full staffing and asset allocation study paired with a space needs study, so that the department and the city administration would have the evidence required before committing to a facility, and the analysis established the foundation for the city’s next phase of pre-design work.