12’s May Not Be the Solution You Think

Fewer and fewer people are signing up to be in law enforcement. The remaining officers are working so many hours that burnout is exacerbating the attrition problem. Agencies think the only way to solve the problem is to enact a 12-hour shift pattern. This is an inefficient solution to decreased staffing.

Is attrition impacting patrol staff numbers? Are you operating with fewer patrol staff numbers than you have allocated? Is overtime in patrol increasing?

When I asked my audience of law enforcement command staff if these statements applied to their agency, a room full of hands went up. When asked what they were doing to solve the problem, many said they were moving to 12-hour shifts. That’s unfortunate, I told them. You’re overstaffing too many hours, to which I received puzzling looks. Let me explain…

Most Efficient Staffing

The most efficient staffing would see the number of officers working each hour proportionate to the demand for that hour. Demand for service changes each hour, and every day is different. So, in a perfect world, we would schedule a different number of officers every hour. For the agency represented below, you can see how the same hour on different weekdays requires a vastly different number of officers to optimally meet demand. For example, 14:00-15:00 on Monday needs 29 officers, while the same hour on Saturday and Sunday only needs 23. That particular hour on Monday has more traffic-related activity than the weekend does, which means more accidents. Accidents are one of the most frequent calls that officers respond to, and they usually take multiple officers to handle and are quite time-consuming.

Deploy Application – taken from an actual agency schedule

We don’t live in a perfect world, so we can’t schedule officers by the hour, but we can try to get as close as possible. The shorter the shift, the closer we can get. The longer the shift, the further we are from optimal allocation. That makes 12’s the furthest from optimal allocation.