NCJ Number
221865
Journal
International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume: 9 Issue: 4 Dated: Winter 2007 Pages: 341-356
Date Published
2007
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This paper describes a simulation model developed to study police manpower planning and scheduling at the strategic level.
Abstract
The model proved effective in allowing police and city officials to evaluate police policy decisions quantitatively. It enables planners to quantify broad performance goals, such as no longer requiring patrol officers to respond to intrusion alarms or no longer requiring patrol officers to respond to noninjury traffic accidents. The model is fairly easy to use with input prepared from an Excel spreadsheet. Model output is organized for graphical presentation from several plotting tools, including Excel. Police and city officials jointly commissioned the development of a simulation model of sworn officer deployment called the Police Deployment Model (PDM). The PDM was envisioned as providing support for both tactical daily scheduling of patrol deployments as well as strategic analysis of future personnel requirements. After describing the Patrol Bureau organization that the model was designed to support, this article describes the PDM and its parameters. The PDM was developed by using a process-resource simulation, in which "events" are written as self-contained software processes in the simulation programming language. The model supports four classes of calls for service, and these service calls are implemented as distinct processes initiated according to call statistics developed from dispatching records. The PDM baseline and validation are presented, followed by descriptions of several proposed strategic policy decisions about police deployment and the use of the PDM to analyze these policy changes. 7 tables, 10 figures, and 12 references