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Staffing & Deployment Studies
How many people the agency needs, where and when they are needed, and what that will cost across a horizon of twenty years or, where a jurisdiction is planning to build-out, longer.
The Question Behind the Question
Almost every staffing study begins the same way. A chief believes the department is short. A finance director believes the department has never demonstrated it. A council sits between them with no way to tell who is right, because the only evidence anyone has produced is a comparison to a neighboring city that may or may not resemble this one.
Our job is to end that argument with measurement. We reconstruct what the department is actually being asked to do, drawing on its own dispatch records, case files, payroll data, and court logs, and we calculate the staffing that workload requires. The peer comparison still appears in the report, but at the end, as a sanity check on a conclusion reached independently.
- Annual incidents handled 71,382
- Time committed to those incidents, in hours 53,537
- Multiplied by three, for administrative time and preventive patrol 160,611
- Divided by 3,650, the hours needed to staff one patrol element for a year 44.0 elements
- Availability factor: 3,650 divided by the 1,658 hours an officer is actually on duty 2.20
- Patrol officers required 97
Scope
What a Staffing and Compensation Engagement Covers
Patrol Staffing and Deployment
Workload-based determination of required patrol strength, shift and platoon configuration, beat and district boundary analysis, span-of-control review, and minimum staffing evaluation. Multiple independent models are run so the finding is bracketed rather than asserted.
Response Time Performance
Component-level analysis of call processing, dispatch, and travel intervals by priority level, reported at median and 90th percentile, with multi-year trend analysis and a proposed service standard the governing body can formally adopt and be measured against.
Investigative Workload
Case-type decomposition with subtask-level work-hour modeling, unit-by-unit staffing requirements, caseload and clearance analysis, and review of triage and assignment protocols.
Communications Center Staffing
Call-taker and dispatcher requirements against discipline standards, peak-window modeling, abandoned-call and service-level performance, supervisory ratios, and turnover analysis.
Compensation, Where It Bears on Staffing
Vacancy and turnover are staffing problems before they are pay problems, so a staffing study reports both. Where the finding points to compensation as the cause, the full salary, benefits, and retirement analysis is set out on our compensation and benefits page, and the two are routinely commissioned together.
Minimum Staffing and Shift Structure
Evaluation of minimum staffing levels, shift and platoon configuration, relief factors, and the overtime consequences of each, separating vacancy-driven overtime from the operational overtime a schedule generates by design.
Civilianization Opportunity
Position-by-position review of duties currently performed by sworn personnel that could be transferred to civilian staff, tiered by lead time and classification complexity, with the sworn hours released quantified against the cost.
Fiscal Impact and Projection
Fully loaded cost modeling under multiple scenarios, overtime decomposition separating vacancy-driven from operational overtime, and a multi-year staffing projection built position by position against planning-zone growth.
Fire and rescue
Fire Staffing Is a Different Discipline, and We Treat It That Way.
Fire and rescue staffing is governed by response standards, effective response force assembly, and apparatus deployment rather than by call-handling capacity alone. We evaluate minimum staffing and response performance against national standards, assess station location and coverage, analyze unit hour utilization to find workload imbalance across stations, and model the cost and operational consequences of alternative shift configurations on overtime, fatigue, and retention.
Where a department’s insurance rating is in play, we decompose the rating schedule component by component so the agency can see precisely where points are being lost and what it would take to recover them.
Schedule of a Comprehensive Assessment
- Days 1 to 60Data collection. Records request, system exports, site visits, structured interviews with command staff, line personnel, human resources, finance, and labor representatives.
- Days 61 to 150Analysis. Availability derivation, workload modeling, response time and demand analysis, peer benchmarking, fiscal modeling, and corroborating document review.
- Days 151 to 180Reporting. Draft report and review cycle with the agency, final report, recommendations matrix, and formal presentation to command staff and the governing body.
The schedule above is the comprehensive multi-agency version, which runs about 180 days. A focused single-agency assessment follows the same three phases on a shorter cycle and is commonly delivered within 120 days of notice to proceed. The schedule is agreed at the outset and reported against throughout.
Common questions
Questions We Are Asked About Staffing Studies
How many police officers does a city our size need?
There is no defensible answer based on population alone. The officers-per-thousand-residents figure that circulates in council meetings compares jurisdictions that differ in call volume, geography, self-initiated activity, court obligations, and service expectations, which is why two cities of identical size can legitimately require very different staffing. The answerable question is how much work the department is actually being asked to absorb, and that is what a workload-based staffing study measures.
What is a police staffing study?
A police staffing study reconstructs the department's actual workload from its own records, including computer-aided dispatch data, case files, payroll and leave history, and court obligations, and calculates the number of sworn and civilian positions that workload requires by function, by shift, and by day of week. The result is a staffing figure the department can defend line by line, together with a projection of how that figure changes as the community grows.
How is a workload-based study different from comparing ourselves to other cities?
A peer comparison tells you what other jurisdictions decided to fund. It does not tell you what your workload requires, and it carries across whatever staffing assumptions those jurisdictions made, sound or not. We calculate the requirement independently from your own data, and the peer comparison appears at the end of the report as a sanity check on a conclusion already reached, rather than as the basis for it.
Can a staffing study conclude that we do not need more officers?
Yes, and it sometimes does. A study can also find that the total is roughly correct while the distribution is wrong, meaning the department is short on one shift and overstaffed on another, or that positions currently held by sworn officers would be better filled by civilian staff at lower cost. Those findings are frequently more valuable than a simple recommendation to hire.
Do you study fire departments and 911 centers as well?
Yes. Fire staffing analysis addresses unit hour utilization, concentration and distribution against response standards, effective response force assembly, and the staffing consequences of the shift schedule in use. Emergency communications analysis addresses call and dispatch volume by hour, position workload, call processing performance, relief factor, and the training pipeline. The method is the same in each case: measure the work, then calculate what the work requires.
What data will you need from us?
Typically computer-aided dispatch records covering four or more fiscal years, records management data on cases and clearances, payroll and leave history sufficient to calculate an accurate relief factor, the current organizational chart and shift schedules, collective bargaining agreements where they exist, and court appearance records. If the data is incomplete or the systems do not report cleanly, we reconstruct what we can and say plainly in the report what could not be verified.
What is a relief factor and why does it matter?
A relief factor is the number of people required on the roster to keep one position filled every hour it must be covered, once vacation, sick leave, training, military leave, injury leave, and holidays are accounted for. Agencies that budget positions without calculating it accurately end up structurally short and fill the gap with overtime, which is why an apparently fully staffed roster can still leave shifts uncovered.
Start the conversation
Tell Us What Your Agency Is Facing.
Most agencies call us about a budget request, a growth pressure, or the start of a facility project. A short conversation is usually enough to tell you whether a study is the right next step, and what it would involve.