What have we done to our police?
911 calls and arrests per officer are down. So why are cops still burning out?
“We all know DC police are busy, but they are far busier in some parts of our city than others.” That’s how NBC 4 investigative reporter Ted Oberg previewed his recent report on MPD not prioritizing officers to the neighborhoods with the most violent crime. I really appreciate Ted and NBC4 bringing attention to this issue and I encourage you to check out the segment:
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/new-dc-police-chief-faces-staffing-challenges/3387023/
That phrase, “We all know DC police are busy,” is worth unpacking. When you talk to MPD officers and their senior leaders they are united in saying just how busy they are. It’s not just words either; many MPD officers are resigning and giving up their years of service towards a secure pension. While MPD also has many workplace problems that are driving people away from the department, it’s worth looking into what is driving the workload for MPD officers.
Unfortunately, MPD does not have a transparent staffing model that could tell us what tasks and duties take up a lot of officers’ time and force over a million hours of overtime (often mandatory overtime) each year. This lack of transparency has really poisoned the public debate about MPD staffing. MPD leaders tend to treat any effort to quantify the “demand” for police officers (especially police-per-capita comparisons to other cities) as an attack and a justification to “defund” the department. In their defense, some of the people asking for a staffing model were probably hoping to cut MPD’s budget. But it does mean that the public is completely in the dark about how many officers MPD needs, how they should be allocated and how we might lessen the workload on our officers. Instead DC has been doomed to debates about “policing” that are mostly just Culture War by other means. Some politicians (and ex-politicians seeking a comeback) have tried to one-up each other by offering suspiciously round numbers (4,000, 4,200 etc.) as the “correct” number of MPD officers. Since MPD’s hiring has not even been able to keep up with attrition despite record recruitment funding, these fantasy staffing targets are just a distraction.
Even without a formal staffing model we can look at the activities that should drive a lot of MPD’s staffing need. However, when we look at the data for responding to 911 calls and making arrests (two major components of policing) we actually see that activity-per-officer is down:
As one can see, MPD staffing is lower but 911 “calls for service” (routed to MPD) and especially arrests are down even more. Recall that when asked about MPD staffing allocations, “calls for service” was the primary workload indicator cited by Mayor Bowser. So this is a major metric that is diametrically at odds with both how MPD officers are feeling and how MPD management is making staffing/overtime decisions. This data is only through Fiscal Year 2022 so it’s possible that with 2023’s increase in crime that the per-officer ratios are higher now. But MPD has been consistently saying the workload is increasing since 2020 and overtime has been at record highs since that time. So what’s going on?
One factor is that we know the workload is unevenly distributed. The data clearly supported the quote in the title of this piece:
With MPD, there really are “slow parts of the city” and other people “getting ground into dust by the work load.”
It’s totally consistent that some parts of MPD could have a wildly disproportionate workload and are experiencing high attrition while overall per-officer workload falls. It’s also important to note that a smaller share of MPD’s officers are assigned to patrol duties:
This shift means that the officers on patrol are dealing with a higher per-officer workload. This could partially explain how the Post came up with this statistic: “The typical patrol officer is responding to 23 percent more calls than five years ago”. However when I calculated the number of 911 calls per officer assigned to Patrol Services I couldn’t replicate the Post’s statistic:
Another possible factor is that MPD may be inefficient in how it schedules and dispatches its officers. We know that when MPD’s scheduled staffing falls short of its internal staffing demand model they force officers to work overtime. With record overtime, we can infer that this shortfall is happening more frequently. What we don’t know is if MPD’s internal staffing demand model is well-calibrated. It’s entirely possible that low-crime police service areas are still forcing their officers to work overtime because their internal staffing model demands it (for whatever reason). This may result in some officers having shifts that are relatively uneventful but still contribute to overall burnout. If they are working well over 40 hours a week they may still be tired and burnt out even if there is a lower volume of 911 calls or arrests.
Another possibility is that MPD is dispatching more officers per 911 call (very often more than 1 officer will/should respond) and this is causing each officer to have busier shifts. The number of officers responding to a call will also be influenced by the call’s priority. There’s been a slight change in the call priority mix according to OUC data:
Sending more officers per 911 call may be justified but here’s a quick example of how this could rapidly escalate officer workload:
Police Service Area A: 15 officers, 300 “calls for service” per officer per year, on average 2.5 officers respond to each call for service
Each officer is involved in 500 calls per year
Police Service Area B: 15 officers, 300 “calls for service” per officer per year, on average 4 officers respond to each call for service
Each officer is involved in 1,200 calls per year
In this example, each officer in Police Service Area B would have be responding to over twice as many 911 calls despite similar “workload” on paper. Small increases in how “aggressively” MPD dispatches officers to 911 calls can have very large impacts on the officer experience. We don’t have any publicly available data on how MPD dispatches its officers but it would be worth MPD’s time to analyze this issue given how it could be contributing to officer burnout. This kind of situation would be consistent with the anecdotal criticisms of groups of MPD officers “standing around talking to each other” after multiple patrol cars respond to an incident.
Lastly, another possible explanation for why MPD officers are burning out while “traditional” workload indicators are decreasing is that they are being made to do other tasks. The PERF report did highlight officer frustration with administrative burdens:
Another section hints that MPD’s administrative workload has been increasing in recent years:
“Supervisors also expressed frustration at how frequently and repetitively they must report critical incident information—to district commanders, assistant chiefs, and across several public communications platforms. With limited personnel resources, supervisors handling duties such as overseeing the provision of life-saving medical care, managing a restless crowd, identifying and detaining witnesses and possible suspects, securing evidence, and maintaining crime scene integrity are also repeatedly called upon to provide real-time information at a chaotic and rapidly unfolding scene. Such distractions have increased despite advances in communications technology, personnel report. These practices make it far more difficult for supervisors to perform their duties at a crime scene or other critical incident.”
“Administrative burdens” are notoriously difficult to measure without labor-intensive time studies (which hopefully will be part of the Auditor’s upcoming MPD staffing study). Independent of that effort, hopefully MPD will look for ways to identify and reduce administrative burdens. One encouraging sign is that MPD is now hiring civilian “Community Safety Ambassadors” to free up officers for core policing duties. This is a concrete example of one of the PERF report recommendations (civilianizing more roles) that is based on best practices in other cities. Some of the other administrative problems in the PERF report relate more to internal paperwork and reporting requirements.
Hopefully leaders at MPD and DC government will take seriously the question of why there is a disconnect between traditional police workload indicators and officer experience. I’ve offered some possible explanations in this post but hopefully others (with access to MPD’s internal data) will drive this further. We know that the workload is unfairly distributed and hopefully Chief Smith’s commitment to prioritize staffing to high-crime areas will reduce those disparities. We don’t know how efficient MPD leaders are at scheduling and dispatching officers and if that is impacting burnout on the ground. We know administrative burdens are a pain point but not how significant they are or how to fix them. These are important questions for DC’s leaders to tackle given that right now MPD seems incapable of rapidly growing its ranks (or even offsetting attrition). How we deploy and treat the officers we have is much more relevant to crime and officer retention today than how many officers we might like to have years from now.
Oh no!