"Bulldog" Coyle, Ace Reporter

Thanks to correspondent G. Coyle, who unearthed this 2004 study made for the City of Tacoma, Wash. The link was provided earlier in a comment posting, but we've decided to post the executive summary in its entirety.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Cost- Benefit Analysis of the Tacoma Police Department’s assigned vehicle program

Mercury Associates, Inc. was selected by the City of Tacoma to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the Police Department’s Assigned Vehicle Program. The project involved initial data gathering including interviews with city and department staff, a survey of police officers, focus group sessions with and a survey of members of various Neighborhood Councils, and development of a quantitative model of the costs and benefits associated with the program. Three central questions were investigated as part of this project: 1) Should vehicles be assigned to officers or should officers share vehicles from a pool? 2) If vehicles are assigned, should officers be allowed to drive them home? 3) If officers take their vehicles home, what criterion should be used for setting the policy on how the city subsidizes commuting costs?

Mercury Associates is the largest fleet management consulting firm in the country and has assisted 200 public and private-sector organizations optimize their fleet management organizations and practices. Clients served in the past by members of our firm include all ten of the largest cities in the country; 28 states, Federal agencies including NASA and the U.S. Army; both public and investor owned utilities, and several prominent Fortune 500 companies. Our project team included Randy Owen, Mercury’s Senior Vice-President, who served as the Project Manager for this engagement; Dr. Donald Lauria of the University of North Carolina who conducted the economic analysis and authored the technical report for the project; and Dave Robertson, a Senior Associate with Mercury Associates and a former Fleet Manager for the City of Houston Police Department.

Interviews, Surveys, and Information Gathering Efforts

We began this project by providing the city with a detailed written data and information request. Response to our request was excellent both by the Police Department and the City’s Fleet Services Section. Our initial meetings and interviews included a broad spectrum of stakeholders including members of City Council, members of Neighborhood Councils, police command staff, police rank and file employees, and Fleet Services staff.

Our work plan included the design of two comprehensive surveys. The first survey was targeted at police officers so that we could develop a thorough understanding of how assigned vehicles are used. The survey was designed to be completed by officers on their in-car computers by connecting to Mercury Associates’ data center over the Internet. The survey, which was kept anonymous in order to encourage honest responses, was distributed electronically to 263 officers and we received responses from 251. This very high response rate produced strong confidence in the statistical validity of survey results. The most significant information and results from the survey are summarized below:

· Twenty-percent of officers reside within city limits, fifty-percent live within 10 miles of city limits, thirty-percent live more than 10 miles away, and ten-percent live more than 20 miles from the city.

· The average one-way distance between respondents’ homes and the city limits is 9.4 miles. The median distance is 7 miles.

· Twenty-four percent of respondents park their assigned police vehicle in their home garage, fifty three-percent park in their driveway, and fourteen percent park on the street.

· When respondents used pool vehicles (before adoption of the current assigned vehicle program) it took an average of 28 minutes to check a vehicle out and load gear and equipment.

· When respondents used pool vehicles they were unavailable an average of 5.6 days per month for a variety of reasons. Changing a car required an average of 25 minutes.

· Eighty-two percent of respondents reported that the condition of their assigned vehicle is much better than pool cars.

· In the past 2 months each respondent made an average of 6 contacts (e.g. assisted in an arrest) outside of normal work hours on their way to and from work/home; the average time spent on these contacts was 36 minutes; forty percent of the contacts were outside the City of Tacoma.

· Ninety-four percent of respondents said they were more productive with an assigned vehicle vs. a pool program.

We also conducted two focus group sessions and a survey of members of Neighborhood Councils. The survey, which members helped design, was sent to 80 individuals and 40 responded. The number and rate of responses provides a respectable level of confidence in the results. The most significant information and results from the survey are summarized below:

· Fifty-three percent of respondents said that Tacoma’s police services were good but needed some improvement and forty-seven percent indicated that services are poor and require much improvement. No respondents said that services were excellent and did not require any improvement.

· Thirty percent of respondents indicated that their knowledge of the assigned vehicle program was good and the rest indicated that it was fair.

· Respondents indicated that the top benefit of the assigned vehicle program was that it allowed officers to respond quickly to emergencies. The benefit that was cited second most often was that the program helped to deter crime.

· Fifty-eight percent of respondents favor assigning vehicles to officers, twenty-six percent were indifferent on this question, and only sixteen percent favored use of pool vehicles.

· Eighty-four percent of respondents favor allowing police officers to take their assigned vehicles home. Fifty percent of these respondents believe that the take-home policy should limit this benefit to officers who live within a certain distance of the city such as 10 miles.

Demands for and Supply of Police Services

In this area of the project we were asked to assess how well Tacoma allocates its police resources, especially personnel and vehicles. Our approach to this question was to examine the average response time to calls for service for each of Tacoma’s police sectors and districts.

The Police Department has organized the city into four sectors, each of which is divided into four districts. The four sectors in Tacoma each have four patrol vehicles on the street at any given time. Sector 1 and Sector 4 also have an additional car due to their large geographical size and configuration. Therefore, Tacoma typically has 18 police vehicles patrolling its streets.

The average response time for the city as a whole during the period that we reviewed (May and June of 2004) was just under 10 minutes. The variation in average response times between districts was relatively small, ranging from a low of 8.5 minutes to a high of 13 minutes. These findings suggest that the way department deploys its manpower and vehicles results in a high and consistent level of service and that no district in Tacoma seems to be under served.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

The main focus of our project for the city was an economic analysis of the costs and benefits of the assigned vehicle program. Our approach to this part of the project followed standard cost-benefit analysis methods, which are well documented in economic literature.

The primary conclusions of our analysis are:

It is far better for the city to assign vehicles to officers than to have them share vehicles from a pool. The equivalent annual savings from our net present value calculation is $1.5 million per year for assigned vs. pool vehicles. The principal reason for the savings is increased officer productivity as a result of not having to check out a pool vehicle and transfer equipment in and out of them each day.

The city is also better off allowing officers to commute in patrol cars and park them at home rather than parking them in a city lot or garage. The annual economic costs of officers taking vehicles home are about $800 per year per vehicle less than the alternative of parking them in a city garage. The difference for the entire fleet of take-home vehicles is about $200,000 per year. Unlike the benefits of assigning a vehicle to each officer, which accrue entirely to the city, only some of the take-home benefits accrue to Tacoma, the rest accrue to the police officers themselves. The fact that the benefits of taking vehicles home are shared jointly by the city and the officers does not reduce the real economic benefits that result from the take-home program. The main reason for this cost difference is that the commuting cost of patrol vehicles is less than the cost of building and operating additional parking places in the city.

The current policy of allowing officers to take police vehicles home provides additional benefits due to officers responding to emerging calls while driving to and from work, responding to calls more quickly, providing citizens with an increased sense of safety by having cars parked in neighborhoods, and better care of police vehicles provided by officers at their homes.

The assigned vehicle program may be producing an unwelcome incentive for police officers to live outside of the city, since there is no charge for commuting and no limit on commuting miles. The city needs to examine and decide how to handle “excess” commuting. Our analysis shows that the break even point for the city to subsidize officers commuting in their vehicles is between 7 and 14 miles one-way based strictly on the financial costs of commuting vs. the financial costs of providing in-city parking.


Recommendations
Our main recommendations related to this project are as follows:

1. The city should continue its policy of assigning vehicles to officers rather than using pool cars.

2. Officers should be allowed to take vehicles home.

3. The city should examine its policy on subsidizing commuting. This policy should not, however, focus entirely on financial issues and should recognize that officers provide services while commuting to and from work that benefit society as a whole.

4. While no evidence of abuse was found, the city needs to be sensitive to perceptions that officers could be unreasonably using police vehicles for personal reasons. Procedures to enforce appropriate policies need to be routinely examined to ensure that they are working.

5. The analysis of how the Police department allocates its personnel and vehicles to meet the demands for police services revealed no particular problems or disparities among districts. Nevertheless, because demands are always shifting, the department needs to exert constant vigilance and scrutiny of its polices and practices to ensure that the citizens of Tacoma are well served.