Palm Bay Police Staffing Study

The engagement

What We Did

The City of Palm Bay is the most populous municipality in Brevard County, home to 158,388 residents across 88 square miles, with an inventory of platted but not yet developed subdivisions that will continue to absorb residential growth over the next decade. The city retained The Center for Public Safety through a competitive procurement to examine staffing across every operational domain of its police department: patrol deployment, response time performance, investigative caseload, communications center workload, civilianization opportunity, overtime trajectory, and a long-range projection carrying the findings forward on a ten-year horizon. Because the scope reached across patrol, investigations, the communications center, and five planning zones, the engagement ran on the full 180-day schedule rather than the shorter cycle a narrower single-agency review follows, with data collection occupying the first sixty days.

The patrol analysis paired the Rule of 60 workload computation with a performance-based adaptive staffing model, both resting on a net availability derivation that works down from the 2,080-hour annual base by explicit deduction of leave, training, court, and administrative time, so that each computation can be read line by line rather than accepted on assumption. Investigative requirements were calculated from a per case type work hours framework that decomposes each unit’s annual caseload by case category and multiplies through published per case hours drawn from subtask-level workflow models. The communications analysis applied APCO Project RETAINS alongside the NENA 90/10 service level framework. Peer benchmarking ran as three separate constructs: a nine-agency Florida peer set, a fourteen-agency dispersion analysis widening the statistical envelope, and a six-agency narrative profile developed during the qualitative phase.

The ten-year projection was built position by position rather than at a uniform citywide rate, classifying every position against a five-category staffing typology and modeling growth across five planning zones with probability-weighted development pipelines. The finished report runs to nine analytical chapters and closes with a consolidated matrix of seven recommendations, each carrying an identifier traceable to the section supporting it, alongside a tiered civilianization plan, beat realignment scenarios, and a response time service standard the city can adopt and report against on a recurring cadence.