New field research will help police agencies optimize their workforces and improve their performance

November 26, 2024 - Emily Johnson

Dr. Jeremy Wilson, Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, received funding from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Office to launch a new platform of research on police staffing in partnership with PFM Consulting. Dr. Wilson notes that the ongoing challenges of understaffing and difficulties in building high-quality, diverse police forces highlight the critical need for focused research in this area. 

With decades of experience in evidence-based personnel planning and resource deployment, Dr. Wilson and his team are dedicated to helping police agencies enhance their workforce strategy and administration. They propose to “to develop lessons on workforce allocation and staff optimization that will enable agencies to increase their capacity for change and community policing.” The tasks of Dr. Wilson and his team’s project are to create allocation models, conduct work schedule simulations, translate organizational learning principles for policing, develop practitioner-oriented resources, and broadly share lessons and resources with the policing and academic communities. 

We sat down with Dr. Wilson to discuss what motivated him to focus his research on police staffing, the key challenges police agencies are facing in building robust workforces, and how his work will help.

 Why is police staffing a prominent issue?

Staffing is the heart of effective public safety. While many resources go to policing communities, there is very little evidence-based guidance to show how agencies can build, maintain and optimize their workforces. We need to enhance this process and make it efficient to find the best staff while maximizing resources. Our goal is to create tools and resources to help agencies figure out and efficiently plan for their staffing needs. I am frequently contacted by city managers, police chiefs, and other officials about these issues directly. The work that we do will assist the countless practitioners who are desperate for help in addressing their staffing needs.

 What are the key challenges facing police departments in terms of staffing?

The key issue currently is the perfect storm of fewer people coming into law enforcement and more people leaving, all while expectations for quality and diversity are increasing. As baby boomers prepare for retirement, agencies are losing officers who have spent their whole career in the field. Further complicating police staffing are incidents of police use of force that have tarnished the image of the profession, changing generational preferences, decreases in qualified applicant pools, management and organization cultural issues, and scheduling problems that interfere with the ability of officers to spend time with family. Overall, it has become increasingly difficult for agencies to attract and retain their staff just as agencies are trying to figure out how many staff they actually need and how to assign them in ways that best serve their communities.

 Can you give us an overview of your project?

Most agencies struggle to assess their staffing needs and lack the tools to determine the right number of staff required, often relying on counterproductive “rules of thumb.” When staffing levels drop below their allocation level, there is a tendency to assume they are understaffed and overloaded. But this level typically is not tied to the actual workload or performance objectives of the agency. This is where conducting a workload assessment becomes important. This is what our work focuses on.

While most people are concerned with recruitment and retention, we are asking the questions, “how do we know how many team members each agency needs, and how can agencies best use their staff?" Our project focuses on a series of resources for agencies to figure out what their optimum number is across their organization, how they can deploy staff members on the most efficient work schedules, and how to apply organizational learning principles across the entire police staffing system.

Our work is incredibly field driven, with a lot of input from practitioners. Our job is to translate our work into tools that agencies can use. We want to create guidebooks to help agencies learn how to adopt organizational learning principles, give them ways to promote innovation and creativity within their organization, and teach them how to bring in information, new ideas, research, and practices. We also plan to conduct simulations to illustrate how different work schedules affect the need for staff.

 How does your research relate to MSU?

The research we do is part of the Police Staffing Observatory (PSO) at Michigan State University and contributes to MSU's Future of Work framework by exploring how effective staffing strategies can improve workforces. Our team also collaborates with Dr. Kevin Ford from MSU’s Department of Psychology. More broadly, our work contributes to MSU’s land-grant mission and supports the College of Social Science’s goal of transforming the human experience by translating science into real-world lessons that improve the safety and security of communities.