Patrol Officer Call for Service Workloads: An Urban and Small Town Comparison

Abstract

Although small town agencies make up the majority of police departments in the USA, there is a surprising lack of information regarding how the workloads of small town and urban police officers differ. The widely held assumption that urban officers deal with higher workloads than small town officers has never been empirically tested. The present study involved a direct comparison of the average number of calls for service handled per patrol car per shift in three city and three small town municipal law enforcement agencies during a two-week period in 2006. The findings indicated that there was considerable variation across all six communities; however, the average number of calls handled by the urban officers was still significantly larger than the average number of calls handled by the small town officers.