Manpower supply planning for routine policing duties

Currently, in Taiwan, manpower supply plans for routine policing duties are typically generated based on the experience of the decision makers, a method which is neither efficient nor effective. In addition, manpower supply planning is generally performed separately for each individual police station without consideration of a mutual support strategy from a system perspective, which is an effective use of manpower resources. In this study, we consider several manpower supply planning strategies and adopt a mathematical programming method to construct two models, an independent manpower assignment model and a mutual manpower support model, for the assignment of routine policing duties, with the objective of minimizing total manpower supply-hours. Numerical tests using real data collected from Taiwan police stations are performed to preliminarily evaluate the two models. The results show that the police manpower plans obtained by applying the models are better than the plans made based on decision maker experience. In addition, it is found that the mutual support model performs better than the independent assignment model.