Fort Worth Police Department Strategic Plan
2016 Criminal Investigation Division Staffing Analysis Investigative caseload has risen over the last five years in several investigative units. While decreases have occurred in property crimes and caseloads associated with property crimes, significant caseload increases have occurred in the violent personal crime, special victim, and economic crime sections. Between 2011 and 2015, increases have occurred in the following units: Commercial Auto Theft (34.2%), Crimes Against Children (14.5%), Homicide (30.9%), Major Case (16.7%), and Sex Crimes (30.5%). Other sections and units experienced decreases between 2011 and 2015 including Fraud (-10.7%), Gang (-104.3%), Missing Persons (-6.1%), and Robbery (-15.18%). Family violence remained flat with a decrease of (-1.0%). Workload, the amount of work (hours spent) necessary for each criminal investigation case, has increased exponentially during the past two decades. Although modern forensics and technology provides detectives and investigators additional tools to improve work product and accuracy, they also require a concurrent increase in the amount of time allotted to investigate offenses, link evidence, and to prepare cases for prosecution. One example of this is the proliferation of video evidence, from both internal (police dash cameras, body cameras, video rooms) and external (home/business surveillance systems and citizens filming with smartphones) sources, all of which must be collected and formatted before a case can be submitted for prosecution. Increased administrative, legal, and District Attorney’s Office requirements has increased the size of investigative workload. With more time required to work each case sufficiently and increases in the number of cases in several of the detective units, most of the investigative units struggle with an unmanageable workload. This can result in cases receiving insufficient attention, which can create a situation where the District Attorney has to plea bargain for lesser sentences due to lacking investigations. This is no fault of the detectives, as they are often tasked with far more cases than they can effectively investigate. It is simply a result of increasing workloads and caseloads while staffing levels remains the same. In summary, workload and caseload increased, while staffing remained relatively flat. The PERF staffing Study and subsequent departmental analyses identified deficiencies in Criminal Investigative Division (CID) Staffing, and determined the optimal investigator staffing levels by analyzing workloads for each independent investigative unit. The study calculated the percentage of cases, separating them into one of the following four categories: require contact only, less complicated, typical, or more complex. Analysts then used averages to determine number of hours required to investigate cases within each category. The results were calculations of total estimated hours to work (investigate, document and/or present) all assigned cases in a specific unit. The workload findings in Figure 3.9, are indicative of the optimal number of detectives required pursuant to current caseload levels. Below is a summary outlining the staffing findings according to each CID unit identified in the PERF study, and both internal reviews; as pictured below, the overall average among findings reflects a shortage of approximately 82 CID detectives, one officer, and 6 sergeants , in order to maintain the recommended span of control (7:1).
How Growth Affects the Fort Worth Police Department
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