Here’s a message for everyone who has criticized the police staffing study we released by saying the staffing model and the data it’s built on don’t reflect the real world:
The first guy through the wall—he always gets bloody. Always. It’s the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds, really what it’s threatening is their livelihoods….their jobs….the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it’s the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people who are holding the reins—have their hands on the switch—they go batsh*t crazy. I mean, anybody who is not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding it, using your model, they’re dinosaurs.
The speaker is the fictional John W. Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, talking to Billy Beane in Moneyball. The same Beane who’d said to his scouts early in the film:
You guys are sitting around, talking the same old good body nonsense like we’re selling jeans, like we’re looking for Fabio. We got to think differently.
They did think differently, the Oakland Athletics, and the rest is baseball history.
Is there a lesson there for D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and the District’s policymakers? In thinking differently—using data, using metrics to rebuild how we staff patrol services across all of the District’s neighborhoods?
I’d say so.
More importantly, the data say so.
The staffing study drafted over a two-year period by the policing experts at PFM Consulting, with expertise honed in the real world of urban police departments including Baltimore and New Orleans, recommends that MPD collect the data on what the sworn members are doing now—how many are pulled off patrol for other details—taking juveniles to New Beginnings or guarding prisoners enroute to and at the hospital—and when and for how long.
That’s data they Do. Not. Have. Today. The department has historically used the Patrol Services Division as its bank for withdrawals of officers, pulling them away from their beats for other responsibilities, without fully analyzing those other responsibilities and whether they might be fulfilled in another, smarter, way.
What does the report say they could be doing better now? A few examples.
Civilianization
For years, including the years I chaired the Judiciary Committee, MPD requested, and funding was provided to hire non-sworn staff to fill roles that did not require police powers.
The District now has hundreds of traffic control officers on the payroll of the Department of Transportation. The Department of Forensic Sciences is tasked with providing civilians to conduct crime scene analysis.
But nonetheless, the study notes that only 14% of MPD’s staff is civilian or professional staff, a lower percent than in five of the six comparable departments used in the report’s benchmarking analysis. The FBI reports that professionals in departments serving between 500,000 and a million residents nationwide make up an average of 23% of the workforce. We recommend getting MPD’s proportion up to 20% to enable moving sworn members away from their desks and into the community.
One place for more civilianization: using professional staff to take online and telephone reports of crimes. In Honolulu online reports can be taken for 15 crimes and other incidents; Tucson allows it for 16. Currently only five crimes can be reported to MPD online.
Special details
MPD district commanders bemoan the fact that officers assigned to patrol and to investigations are frequently pulled from their regular duties for special details—in particular for hospital guard duty for prisoners, to take juveniles to D.C. facilities in Maryland, and for Homeland Security Branch assignments.
Commanders estimate patrol officers spend 45,000 to 49,000 hours per year on hospital details—more than they spend on domestic violence or traffic calls. But these are estimates. MPD doesn’t track hospital details uniformly through the computer-aided dispatch system, nor the amount of time spent, though current technology has the capacity for such reporting.
The study includes an estimate that nearly 200,000 patrol officer hours are taken up yearly with Homeland Security details like covering demonstrations or escorting dignitaries. Again, these are estimates, and these estimates contain major inconsistencies because the seven police districts use different definitions and the data are not consistently collected.
We recommend that MPD collect standardized personnel and time utilization data to more comprehensively assess how time is now spent not just on special details but calls for service and proactive policing and develop alternatives to better manage both patrol and investigator time.
“We got to think differently”
The staffing question comes down to this: how do you make change? A reporter at our press Q&A on the police staffing study asked if MPD is required to follow ODCA’s recommendations. The answer, sadly, is no—we have significant powers but mandating action by the police or any other agency isn’t one of them. But we will follow up to chart progress on improving the management of the department’s huge Patrol Services Division.
Our Metropolitan Police Department is arguably best-in-class among urban departments in a number of areas. There have been lapses, of course, but we handle political demonstrations better than anyone else, consistently—based on lawsuits, legislation, oversight and years of experience and training to the point where one recent chief persistently bragged on that mastery of the task.
There have been lapses here, too, but the department has been praised as a leader in use of force investigations and corrective action—based on eight years of partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice and, again, on legislation, oversight, litigation, and department training. Effective and evidence-proven deployment of sworn staff could be another superlative for the District’s police department.
Put another way: Listen to John Henry and Billy Beane. Don’t be a dinosaur.
