Reframing the Police Staffing Challenge: A Systems Approach to Workforce Planning and Managing Workload Demand. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Vol. 18, 2024.
Policing agencies in the United States and elsewhere continue to face staff shortages. Calls for greater diversity and different skills among police officers further complicate staffing efforts. Attempts to address these issues typically focus on recruitment and retention. This oversimplifies the problems and leads to piecemeal solutions. We draw on multiple threads of staffing research and field experience to highlight lessons for building effective police workforces. We illustrate the interconnected nature of staffing allocation, workload demand, performance objectives, staff supply…