Laredo Comprehensive Public Safety Assessment

The engagement

What We Did

The City of Laredo retained The Center for Public Safety through a competitive procurement to examine its police and fire departments across compensation, benefits, retention, operations, and fiscal planning. Laredo occupies an unusual position among American cities. It is a community of roughly 261,000 residents spread across 106 square miles that also functions as the country’s premier inland port, handling more than 16 million vehicle crossings a year. That combination produces service demands and labor market conditions, including steady recruitment competition from federal agencies, that a population comparison alone will never capture, and the study was built accordingly.

The compensation work benchmarked the police department against twenty-one Texas municipalities and the fire department against seventeen, drawn from three tiers: border communities operating in comparable conditions, Texas cities of similar size, and the large metropolitan departments that set the upper bound of the statewide market. Every salary schedule was standardized to an annual equivalent before comparison, positioning was calculated at each stage of the career rather than at entry alone, and the review extended to total compensation, covering employer benefit contributions, retirement plan valuation, incentive and certification pay, and career earnings.

Operational analysis ran in parallel. The team reviewed more than 30,000 officer-initiated activity records across twenty-nine data fields for calendar years 2023 through 2025, examined 31,693 incident records spanning twenty offense categories, and evaluated patrol workload by beat, by hour, and by response time component. On the fire side, CPS measured response performance against NFPA 1710, assessed coverage across fifteen active stations carrying 35,919 emergency medical responses a year, and compared the shift configurations in use at peer departments.

Fiscal modeling paired a deterministic cost buildup with Monte Carlo simulation across 10,000 iterations, producing probability distributions and a sensitivity ranking over a five-year horizon. The finished assessment runs to twenty-one analytical chapters and seven priority recommendations, sequenced into immediate, short-term, medium-term, and long-term phases, with the benchmarking appendices and documented method left in a form the city can reapply in future budget cycles.