“Continuity in Efforts” for more effective police services

With the economy struggling to recover and public safety organizations continuing to battle with shrinking budgets, the implementation of “Continuity in Efforts” programs can help organizations more effectively deploy its personnel.

To understand the significance of a “CE” program, one must first look at the way people are deployed by law enforcement agencies. The “CE” program can work in all divisions, but for this article I will focus on the back bone of police functions, field operations.  In most police departments the field operations are deployed utilizing three shifts, day, evening, and night. These three shifts should be considered individual units, because they operate with different supervision, personnel, and differencing community needs based on their shifts. Each shift / unit has their own priorities that may not overlap with the preceding shift. At the end of the shift, a new set of priorities begin and the previous shifts focus and priorities end.  By sharing overlapping responsibilities through the CE program an organization can eliminate the silo effect cause by current management practices. They can more effectively deploy their personnel and increase overall effectiveness’ and increase employee engagement. 

By sharing responsibility for resolving problems occurring on a 24 hour basis, the individual units become more focused on the larger picture instead of what only happens on their unit’s tours. As a division, area, precinct, or sector commanders can become more creative in developing out of the box solutions, which break the current deployment molds, and be held accountable for resolving issue. By creating sense of ownership and connectedness by all shifts in resolving priority problems an organization is able to focus the efforts of its personnel instead of having three shifts working independently on its own priorities.  

By removing the silos of the three independent shifts and creating a focus for all shifts the officers can then be better deployed, efficiency increased and ultimately having a positive effect on an organizations overall budget. The CE model allows for more creativity from commanders in deployment and overall crime fighting strategies. Some officers may adjust their hours and come in earlier of later. The officers are not simply there to run calls, but assist other shifts in removing the root causes of your crime problems for the area.  This also allows more flexibility in how the officers operate and expands on their ability to use alternative patrols for increased effectiveness.  This has a second benefit, when officers are allowed to expand and do different forms of police work, besides riding calls for their shifts, their engagement goes up. When engagement goes up, their effectiveness rises in proportion. As their effectiveness goes up in one area a department is able to shift valuable resources to handle other problems.

An example of how the “CE” model transforms all three independent shifts into single unit with shared priorities:  An area has a theft from motor vehicle problem in morning, narcotics sales in another part beginning in the later afternoon, and finally, night clubs causing problems late in the night.  By creating shared responsibility to work together all three shifts focus their efforts to resolve the problems.  As one unit prepares to end its shift the next unit then takes its place prioritizing its efforts, along side of running calls for service, on working on a specific problem. The midnight shift will have one or two officers walking the problem area, bicycling, or conducting surveillances in the last few hours of its shift when the thefts from motor vehicle begin. The day shift will then continue to focus on the thefts from motor vehicles during the early part of its shifts and then later transition to resolving the narcotics problem, which starts late in their shift. In the afternoon, the day shift then focuses on the narcotics problem utilizing alternative patrols. The evening shift can adjust one or two officer’s hours to come in early to assist in the narcotics issue. When the evening shifts tour starts they immediately focus their alternative patrols on the narcotics issue, therefore increasing the time focuses on resolving the making an impact.  Later, the evening shift will transition its efforts in preparing for issues associated with the night clubs. When the midnight shift begins their tours, they continue with the “continuity in efforts” by taking over the night club assignment. In the early morning the midnight shift starts the cycle again by concentrating on the thefts from autos.

The key to increasing productivity, reducing crime, and reducing strains on public safety budgets is for all organizations to analyze their organizations to and see how “Continuity of Efforts” can best be utilized to increase overall effectiveness.