Police Dept. Short handed?

While reading the recent news about ex officer Fitters I discovered the Evansville Police Dept at full staffing employs 8 full time employees and 7 part time employees. That seems like a lot of cops for a city of 5000 people. For arguments sake I took the liberty of writing a work schedule. Now I can’t imagine we need any more than 2 officers on at a time but I put 3 officers on both Friday and Saturday nights. You know the routine unruly bar patrons, drinking and driving, busting up underage drinking parties, curfew violators, etc.

Here’s the Schedule:

I put this together in about 5 min. As you can see I am using only the 7 FT officers currently on staff plus the one FT officer on light duty. What does a cop on light duty do all day?

I have all of the shifts covered with a 1 full timer on a week’s vacation and another with 2 days. All of the part timers are on 24 hours a week as 32 hours is considered full time in most occupations. I realize that they will occasionally have court dates set up that can easily be accomplished by jogging a couple part timers around and cutting hours the next week. You will also not have 2 officers on vacation in the same week and the one on light duty won’t be there forever.

So this begs the question. Do we need 8 full time police officers on our force? I believe Fitters made around a $52,000.00 salary and a package of around $67,000.00 when you add in benefits.

Don’t get me wrong I enjoy living in a safe community. One where I don’t feel I have to lock my front door to go to my neighbors house, where I can leave my car running while I run in for a cup of coffee or not lock it when it’s sitting in my driveway in the middle of the day.

I’m just wondering if we really need 15 officers on our Police Dept. Payroll.

If anyone has more insight on the way their schedule is set up please post.

What do you think?