DEA based models for reallocations of police personnel

A difficult aspect of improving the efficiency of service organisations in the developed world is the need to lay‐off experienced people, whose training had significant costs and where later replacements are both costly and time consuming. This paper shows a novel way to reallocate personnel resources between tasks within a specific unit as well as between similar units using a data envelopment analysis model set. As there are many different ways to reallocate people, we propose six different scenarios to provide for different circumstances or policy objectives that may exist in the organisations. The method is illustrated using police units in a major metropolitan area and the results herein illustrate how efficiency improvements can be made in the police units’ operations with very different impacts on the people involved for the various scenarios. This method saves resources and improves operating efficiency while allowing management to consider or compare the results following from different objectives. In some cases it may also preserve morale amongst the personnel, when the necessary productivity and efficiency improvements are made in ways that specifically aims at also minimising the impact on the personnel.