When police departments or sheriff’s offices need a new work schedule for their officers/deputies, they tend to do one of the following: (1) keep the same work pattern (e.g., 6-on-3-off) they’ve been using even though the staff size may have changed, (2) copy another department’s schedule, or  (3) use a schedule template they found on the internet. Unfortunately, this rarely results in an effective use of their staff.

Why? Focusing on work patterns or schedule templates does not address the primary purpose of the schedule, namely to match the coverage with the workload. Since most police departments don’t have steady work volumes, it’s essential that the schedule reflect this. The ideal schedule will produce higher coverage when the group is busiest and less coverage when it’s not.

So how do you accomplish that? Here’s an example of how I approach the design of police schedules.

Background

A small police department contacted me for help with their schedule. They had 15 officers and wanted to adopt 10-hour fixed shifts.

Hourly Workload

My first step was to gather information on the work volume by time of day. The Chief gave me a table showing the number of incidents over the past year. I calculated the averages for each one-hour period of the day, which are shown below.

This department is busiest from 12 noon to 7 p.m. and slowest from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. Given their limited budget, I decided to only show them two different approaches:

• Approach #1: two 12-hour shifts with one 8-hour overlay shift from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. - which increases coverage on their busy period
• Approach #2: four 10-hour shifts - so the overlaps run from 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. - which reduces coverage on their slow period

Daily Workload

The next step was to see if the workload varied from day to day. Here are the average number of incidents that I calculated from the Chief’s data.

The daily variations were nowhere near as large as the hourly variations, suggesting that steady coverage throughout the week would be okay. In many police departments, Friday and Saturday are often busier and therefore warrant custom-designed work patterns featuring higher coverage on those two days. That was not the case for this client.

Shift Assignments

I allocated the 15 officers to the shifts as follows:

• Approach #1 (8&12-hour shifts):
  • 12-hour day shift = 6
  • 12-hour night shift = 6
  • 8-hour overlay shift = 3
• Approach #2 (10-hour shifts):
  • First 3 shifts = 4 each
  • Last shift = 3

Schedule Details

For each approach, I created 2-3 options showing different work patterns. I’m skipping all the schedule details, like shift start/end times and work patterns, and jumping to resulting coverage, since these are only applicable to this particular situation.

Coverage

Conclusions

By starting the schedule design process with the workload (rather than desired shift lengths or popular schedule patterns), I identified two approaches that would match the coverage with the workload. After allocating the staff to the shifts, I generated a few different work patterns so the organization could evaluate the trade-offs and choose the one that most people preferred.

Had the Chief kept their existing 8-hour work pattern, the coverage would have varied between 3 and 4 people around the clock. Had he found a 10-hour work pattern using just 3 shifts, the coverage would have varied between 2 and 3 people. Would they have been happy with these? Maybe - not knowing that superior options were out there. 

By hiring me, they not only discovered different approaches, but also were given alternative patterns for each approach. They were able to show these options to the officers, so they could voice their opinions and secure a more widely acceptable solution. The organization got a more effective schedule and the officers appreciated being involved in the schedule selection process and the opportunity to choose from multiple options.