Call in extra officers
March 29, 2019
7
In certain situations E.g. riots etc. you should be able to call in extra officers, just like in real life. My suggestion is, that if you have 10 officers on duty, you should be able to call in 20 additional officers, since I assume that the department uses 3 shifts per day.
Of course calling in extra officers costs extra wages.
You could even generalize this to an “overtime” system. You can imagine lots of use cases for overtime:
– Emergency overtime like you described (2x normal pay?)
– Schedule patrol overtime. You might want this if a high-profile event like an election or major sports game or something is going to happen. (1.5x pay)
– Extra detective shifts. There is a high profile case you need closed NOW. Adding additional detectives won’t help, but you can pay the investigators on the case time-and-a-half to work two shifts a day instead of one.
– On-call special units. SWAT, bomb squad, executive protection, and other special units might be staffed as-needed from off-duty officers. (1.5x pay)
In addition to the financial cost you should have to worry about the psychological and physiological costs. Officers mental skills (judgement, conflict resolution, integrity, leadership) will take a hit every time they work overtime. An extra shift here or there won’t do any harm, but if your detectives are burning the midnight oil 5 days a week they’re going to quickly end up less productive in 16 hours than they used to be in 8.
Yeah, that is some good points you got there. I think that there are many options, but what is also important is, that it is easy to see how much it costs and that the officers you call in, “looks” like the officers you already got, when it comes to skills and training levels, and of course also when it comes to male/female ratio.