SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT

Optimal Spatial Deployment

of Police Patrol Cars

STEPHEN R. SACKS
University of Connecticut

The spatial deployment of a scarce municipal resource, police cars, is examined with respect to four cri-
teria: response time, workload balance, patrol frequency, and interdistrict dispatches. Standard results
from queuing theory are supplemented by the addition of spatial concepts to provide the basis for a
computer implementation called The Desktop Hypercube. This software allows police planners to
draw patrol districts on a map of their city and to evaluate performance according to these criteria. By
repeatedly redrawing districts and reevaluating, they should be able to improve performance. Using
data on police calls in New Britain, Connecticut, The Desktop Hypercube is used to measure perfor-
mance while varying the number of cars, the number of patrol districts, and the way the districts are
drawn. Certain basic trade-offs become evident, some of which are especially important to cities in
which community policing is a high priority.

Keywords: spatial deployment, police patrol, community policing, computer mapping

T his article examines the spatial deployment of a scarce municipal resource: police cars.
In it, I describe the use of computer software designed to improve the efficiency of gov-
ernment’s use of that resource. The software is easily used by police planners to evaluate and
implement policies whose effects are not readily discernible with intuition alone. The pro-
gram will run on any modest desktop computer. In Part 1, the theory underlying the analysis
is presented, and in Part 2, I apply the software to a case study (New Britain, CT).
The average police car costs more than a quarter of a million dollars per year. Of course,
the car itself costs only a 10th of that, but if we include the salaries and fringe benefits1 of the
officers needed to man it around the clock, this estimate is conservative. Therefore, the effi-
cient geographical deployment of patrol cars is quite important: If a city can provide a given
level of police services with, say, 15 patrol cars instead of 16, it thereby saves hundreds of
thousands of dollars, which it can either return to the taxpayers or put to some other use,
depending on political and community pressures.
Many criteria could be used to measure the quality of police services. In this article, four
are used, all of which depend in part on the design of patrol districts. The first criterion is
response time—that is, the time that elapses from the moment the police department receives
2
a call for service (CFS) until a police car arrives at the scene. Response time, which is of
greatest importance for high-priority calls, includes both time waiting for a car to become
available and travel time. With respect to travel time, I discuss both the regionwide average
and differences between various parts of the city. Clearly, if we compare two sets of police

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author wishes to express his gratitude to Jim Donnelly of the New Britain Department of
Public Safety for his invaluable assistance with both data and insight.
Social Science Computer Review, Vol. 18 No. 1, Spring 2000 40-55
© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
40
 Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT 41

performance statistics, both of which have the same average response time but one of which
has less variance across the neighborhoods in the city, the one that gives more uniform
response times is preferable. Legitimate complaints are heard when a system gives prompt
responses to those who live in the mayor’s part of town but long waits for those who live else-
where. The second criterion is workload balance among the cars that are on duty during any
particular shift. Differences are important not only because the patrolmen’s union wants a
fairly uniform workload, but also because time when police officers are not responding to a
CFS is time they spend patrolling their neighborhoods. Just cruising around—that is, preven-
tive patrol—is one of the services that citizens want most from their police department. A
third measure of the quality of a particular police deployment plan is patrol frequency: Most
citizens want a police car to pass by often. Although that is obviously related to the amount of
time spent patrolling, we shall see that concern with patrol frequency imbalances across dif-
ferent parts of the city may lead to differently drawn districts from those implied by the sec-
ond criterion. The fourth criterion is the number of interdistrict dispatches, an important
issue in cities in which community policing is official policy. An underlying principle of
community policing is that police officers should know their territory, and that principle is
undermined if cars are often sent out of their districts.
The focus of this article is on the empirical work presented in Part 2. However, so that the
reader may understand the calculations done in Part 2, I begin with a description of the under-
lying theoretical work.

PART 1: THEORETICAL ANALYSIS

If the public’s need for police services were uniform across time, it would be a fairly sim-
ple matter for local governments to calculate how many police officers are needed to provide
that service. However, unlike, say, rubbish collection, the need for police services varies, not
only across the hours of the day and the days of the week but also from 2:00 a.m. on one Sat-
urday to 2:00 a.m. on another Saturday. Furthermore, whereas rubbish collection or road
repair could, if unfinished, be left for the next day, police departments are unwilling to tell a
caller that a car will be sent in a day or two. Because calls for police service are a random vari-
able, we need queuing theory to calculate basic statistics.
If there were no spatial aspect to the situation, we could represent the police force as a sim-
ple queuing system with N servers and λ calls per hour. We could then use standard formulae
to calculate basic statistics like callers’ waiting time and the proportion of time a police car
spends responding to calls. However, there are two characteristics of police response sys-
tems that further complicate matters: (a) the addition of spatial concepts (in a bank, all cus-
tomers and all tellers are in one room, but police cars, citizens, and criminals are distributed
across the city); and (b) the need to identify servers (in a bank, you do not care which teller
waits on you, but you do care whether the police car sent to your home is coming from around
the corner or from the other side of town). Consequently, we need to model not only how
many cars are busy at any moment but also which ones are busy and where each free car is
likely to be, as well as the location of callers.
Two key concepts in our implementation of this model are the atom and the patrol district,
which represent where the calls originate and where the cars are, respectively. An atom is the
smallest geographical unit for which CFS data are collected. This could be, for example, a
city block or a census block group. A patrol district is a set of one or more atoms to which a
car is assigned to patrol and to respond to calls. In the model, I calculate each car’s expected
location as a function of its patrol pattern. Usually, I assume that when not responding to a
CFS, police cars, unlike ambulances, will not be parked in some central location; rather, they
42 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

will patrol. For example, I can assume that the amount of time a car spends patrolling in each
of its atoms is proportional to the number of CFS from that atom. Alternatively, I can assume
that patrol time is uniform across all the atoms in a district. If it seems appropriate, the model
would allow me to assume that a car patrols a single atom (e.g., remains in a mall parking
lot). In any case, its expected location when not servicing a call is the weighted average of the
centroids of the atoms that make up its district, the weights being the proportion of patrol
time devoted to each atom. In the simple case of a two-atom district in which the car is known
to spend two thirds of its free time patrolling Atom A, I calculate its expected location to be one
3
third of the way along a straight line from the centroid of Atom A to the centroid of Atom B.

The Hypercube Queuing Model

At the heart of the analysis used in this article is the hypercube queuing model developed
by Richard C. Larson (1974) and implemented in computer software by Larson and Sacks.
This model allows me to focus on the problem of dividing an urban area into an optimal set of
districts in which police cars patrol and respond to calls. When a call is received, the dis-
patcher will assign it to the car in whose district the call originates if that car is free. Other-
wise, it will be assigned to another car if any are available.
At any moment, a police car is either free to respond to a call or already busy servicing a
call. With the hypercube model, I think of these two states for a single car as the two ends of a
line segment. To represent a two-car police force, I use a unit square drawn with one corner at
the origin of a pair of axes (see Figure 1a). The four possible states of the two-car force are
represented by the four corners of the square: (0,0) represents both cars free, (1,0) represents
the first car busy and the other free, (0,1) represents the first car free and the other busy, and
(1,1) represents both busy. If there are three cars, the vertices of a cube represent the eight
possible combinations of busy and free (Figure 1b). If there are more than three cars, I need a
hypercube, each vertex of which uniquely corresponds to one of the possible states of the
world. (Sorry, I cannot draw the n-dimensional cube.)
Two different events can occur: (a) the police receive a CFS that changes the status of a
car from free to busy, and (b) a busy car completes a call and thus changes its status from
busy to free. Both events may be represented by moving from a vertex of the hypercube to
an adjacent vertex. Calls received when all cars are busy are either put in a queue or
assumed “lost.”
In a path-breaking article, Larson (1974) described a finite-state, continuous-time Mar-
kov process in which a state transition matrix defines movement from one vertex to another
of the hypercube, representing the constellation of available and busy cars. Transition prob-
abilities are determined using (a) historical data on CFS from each atom and (b) the expected
locations of all cars, which in turn depend on their assigned atoms and their patrol patterns.
With these, Larson (1975) calculates the probability that the ith car will be sent to the jth
4
atom, as well as other important results.
Consider, for example, vertex (1,0,0) of the cube representing a three-car force, at which
only Car 1 is busy. The probability of moving to (1,1,0) is the conditional probability that a
call is received when Car 1 is busy, Cars 2 and 3 are free, and Car 2 is expected to be nearer the
caller. To calculate this probability, it is necessary to calculate for each atom a “dispatch pref-
erence vector”; that is, I calculate the expected location of each car by stating its patrol pat-
tern as a set of probable locations, and then, for each atom, I calculate the expected distance
from each car and rank the cars by this expected distance. These vectors need to be calculated
just once for each atom. Once I have them, I need for each atom the probability that its ith
ranked car is the first available car (i.e., it is free and all the more preferred ones are busy).
 Figure 1: The Possible States of Two-Car and Three-Car Police Forces.
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44 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

This is difficult because the probability that any particular car is busy is not independent of
whether the others are busy. Larson showed that, using the following notation,

Bi = a state where car i is busy,

Fi = a state where car i is free,
N = the number of cars,
λ = mean CFS rate,
µ-1 = mean service time,
ρ = λ/Nµ is the system utilization factor,
ρi = fraction of time car i is busy,
ρik = fraction of dispatches that send car i to atom k,
Pk = probability that k cars are busy,
Q(N, ρ, j) is an error correction factor,
nkj = ID number of the jth preferred car for atom k,
fk = fraction of all calls that come from atom k,

the probability that the first j cars are busy and the j + 1st car is free is5 P{B1B2 . . . BjFj + 1} =

N
[∑ k =
−1
j
{(N – j – 1)!(N – k)/(k – j)!}(Nk / N!)ρk-j] • ρj(1 – ρ)[P0/(1 – ρ)].

With this, he can calculate the probability that there will be dispatched to atom k its jth pre-
ferred car:6

ρn kj
k = fk Q (N , ρ, j −1) [∏ j −1
ρ
l =1 n kl ]( − ρ ).
1
n kj

Once I have these probabilities, it is fairly straightforward to calculate all the other impor-
tant statistics: total workload for each car, interdistrict dispatches, average travel times,
patrol frequencies, and so forth. For example, total workload for car i is merely the sum
across all atoms of ρik. Similarly, expected travel time for a car to respond to a CFS originat-
ing in atom k merely requires summing across all cars the probability that that car will be dis-
patched to answer that call multiplied by the expected distance it will travel, divided by the
speed at which it travels. Much of this is just careful bookkeeping and aggregating.
In many cases, police planners are particularly interested in imbalances across districts in
terms of workload, travel time, and patrol frequency. Hence, I calculate each of these for each
district.
These formulae are conceptually clear, but there are some practical problems in solving
the model: For as few as 10 cars, there are 1,024 simultaneous equations to solve, and for as
few as 15 cars, more than a billion memory locations are needed to invert the state-transition
2N
matrix. It has 2 elements (where N is the number of cars). (New Britain, Connecticut, typi-
cally has about 12 cars on the road at one time; Hartford has between 25 and 35.) Fortunately,
in the 1975 article, Larson developed an efficient method for reducing the computational and
computer memory demands of the problem. His approximation procedure requires that N
rather than 2N equations be solved. The approximation procedure gives results that are in
most cases less than 2% different from those found using the exact method.7
Using Larson’s (1975) mathematical model, he and I developed software that we call The
Desktop Hypercube. It allows us to begin with historical data on number of CFS from each
geographical atom and then to calculate the following performance estimates: (a) mean
travel time for each patrol car, each atom, each district, and the whole region; (b) percentage
 Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT 45

of each car’s time that is spent responding to calls; (c) percentage of each car’s calls that are in
its own district; (d) percentage of each district’s calls that are handled by its own car; and (e)
standard deviation and maximum difference among cars of workloads and travel times. Also
calculated is the probability of saturation—that is, the probability that all response units are
busy simultaneously. If a CFS is received when all cars are busy, then a preset parameter
determines whether (a) the call is delayed in queue until a car is free, or (b) it is assumed to be
transferred to some backup system (perhaps the police department of some nearby town) and
thus is lost (not served).

PART 2: SIMULATION RESULTS

In many situations, police planners, academics, and ordinary citizens think they can logi-
cally deduce the practical implications of some change in police car deployment. Unfortu-
nately, often what seems obvious is wrong. Because of the complexity of the relevant factors,
intuition may lead us astray. And certainly, intuition alone will not allow us accurately to
weigh the magnitudes of opposing forces. In Part 2, the hypercube model is used to calculate
expected values for several important statistics.
The Desktop Hypercube software has been used to redesign patrol districts by the police
departments in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Orlando, Florida; and Hartford, Connecticut.
Unfortunately, significant changes in population, crime rates, and number of police officers
make it impossible to do meaningful before-and-after comparisons of performance. How-
ever, in the virtual reality of computer memory, it is possible to calculate various perfor-
mance measures, redesign districts, and then recalculate those measures. By comparing the
results of a number of such recalculations, we can get some guidance on how to design the
best police patrol districts. My attention will focus on the four performance measures dis-
cussed above: travel time, workload balance, patrol frequency, and proportion of dispatches
out of district. Districts will be designed to have either roughly equal areas or roughly equal
numbers of CFS.
An important feature of The Desktop Hypercube is that with a couple of mouse clicks, an
atom can be reassigned from one patrol district to another and the performance statistics
recalculated. If, for example, the workload imbalance among cars is unacceptably high, in
less than a minute the user can move an atom from one district to another and recalculate.
Indeed, the ability to easily redraw patrol districts is what makes this a valuable design tool
for police planners.
The data used for these calculations come from New Britain, Connecticut, a city of about
75,000 people. I have the date, time, and street address of every one of the 60,264 CFS
received by the New Britain Police Department between January 1 and December 31, 1997.
8
Using Mapinfo, I geocoded the addresses so that the location of calls can be seen on a map
and, more important, each call can be tagged with the ID of the corresponding census block
group. This allowed me to get a count of calls for each of the 70 block groups in New Britain,
thus making it possible to calculate the probability that a call will come from each of these 70
geographical atoms. The city covers approximately 14 square miles, with each atom consist-
ing of about 0.2 square mile.

Average Travel Time

What do you think will happen to average travel time if the number of patrol cars is
increased? If there is no districting (i.e., all cars patrol the whole city), then, surprisingly,
46 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

regionwide average travel time does not change as the number of cars increases from 6 to 15.
(Six is the minimum number needed in New Britain to prevent buildup of an infinite queue;
15 is more than are usually available.) This surprising result is easily explained. Average
travel time is calculated by summing, across all atoms and all cars, the travel time from each
car’s expected location to the corresponding atom, each trip being weighted by the likelihood
of its occurrence. If all cars follow the same patrol pattern, then they all have the same
expected location. Hence, the trip to a given atom is the same for all of them. Adding more
cars increases the likelihood that a car is available but does not change the length of the trip.
We would like to think that for any given dispatch, the nearest car will be sent; but our
model does not assume that the dispatcher knows the exact location of every available car at a
particular moment. To do so would require either geo-positioning hardware in every car (a
level of sophistication not yet present in most police departments) or an intolerable delay
while the dispatcher asks every officer where she or he is. Instead, the model (and many
police departments) uses the predetermined dispatch preference vector for each atom—that
is, an ordered list of cars based on their expected locations. If they all have the same patrol
pattern, then they all have the same expected location.
Now let us think about a situation in which each car has its own patrol district. In this case,
one would expect travel time to fall as the number of cars is increased: Because the dispatch
preference vector for each atom ranks cars according to their expected distance from that
atom, intuitively we would think that if a nearby car is available, it will make a shorter trip.
Indeed, it is true that if a nearby car is available, it will be sent. However, there is another
way to think about this: If there are 10 cars on duty, patrolling different parts of the city, your
call for help may be assigned to a car that is far away. It depends on which ones are busy at the
moment you call. As a resident of the northeast corner of the city, you would certainly want
some patrol cars assigned to cruise your neighborhood rather than have them all park at the
city center. On the other hand, there is a quid pro quo involved: If some cars patrol the north-
east corner rather than stay in the center, then other cars will cruise in the southwest corner
rather than stay in the center. Now, it is not self-evident that you really do not prefer having
them all in the middle (or, equivalently, following identical citywide patrol patterns). We
cannot balance these two logical arguments intuitively; fortunately, The Desktop Hypercube
provides the tools to examine the issue empirically.
The “equal-area” curve in Figure 2 shows that regionwide average travel time declines
and then increases as the number of cars (and districts) is increased. The minimum is at 11
cars, which reduces regionwide average travel time by 16% below what it is when all cars
have identical patrol patterns (as shown by the “no-districts” curve).
The patrol districts used for these calculations were drawn by eye to be as nearly equal in
size as possible, given that each must be a collection of whole atoms, which are the block
groups drawn by the Census Bureau. One might ask whether a different criterion for district
size might yield different results. One alternative would be to design the districts so that,
instead of equal areas, they have roughly equal numbers of CFS. It turns out that doing so
reduces the average travel time slightly and puts the minimum at a slightly smaller number of
cars: The “equal-CFS” curve in Figure 2 has its minimum at nine cars and at that point is 21%
below the no-districts curve.
Without further empirical studies, it is not possible to say whether the same number of
cars will minimize regionwide average travel time for other cities of comparable size. But the
point here is not to find universal principles (although there probably are some, and it would
be valuable to learn them); my concern is to demonstrate that The Desktop Hypercube is a
valuable tool in finding such relationships in one city at a time.
 Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT 47

Figure 2: Regionwide Average Travel Time (number of districts = number of cars)

Fixed Number of Cars

Up to this point, I have considered the effect on travel time of increasing the number of
patrol cars. I looked at situations in which all the cars patrol the whole city and at situations in
which each car has its own district (where districts are of roughly equal size as measured by
either geographical area or number of CFS). Now, let us examine a different variable: Hold
the number of patrol cars fixed at 12 (which is the number usually on the road in New Brit-
ain), and vary the number of districts. That is, I calculate average travel time when all 12 cars
patrol the whole city, when the city is divided into two districts (with 6 cars patrolling each
9
district), when it is divided into three districts (with 4 cars each), and so forth. What I am
doing now is holding fixed the amount of resources (cars and officers) and changing how
they are deployed.
Ask yourself what will happen to travel time as the number of districts (but not the number
of cars) increases. On one hand, as the city is increasingly finely broken up, each atom is
more likely to have a car “of its own” nearby. On the other hand, from the point of view of a
particular citizen, some cars are patrolling only distant atoms. If one of the latter is sent, the
trip will be a long one. Again, we cannot logically weigh the opposing arguments, but The
Desktop Hypercube allows me to calculate the answer. Figure 3 shows that the former argu-
ment is stronger up to about 5 districts, and after that the latter is stronger. That is, average
travel time is minimized in the range of 5 to 7 districts, at about 7.6 minutes, which is 27%
less than average travel time with no districting and 12% less than with 12 districts. The same
exercise done with districts defined to equalize CFS, rather than area, yields almost exactly
the same results: The graphs of the two are nearly indistinguishable.
There is another implication of varying travel times: We are often interested not only in
the regionwide average, but also in the difference between travel time for some parts of the
city and other parts of the city. Because travel time is, from the point of view of the caller,
48 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

Figure 3: Regionwide Average Travel Times (with 12 cars)

Figure 4: Maximum Travel Time Imbalance (number of districts = number of cars)

time spent waiting for the police to arrive, we may worry that some of our citizens get better
service than others. Below, I show how the maximum difference between districts varies
with number of cars (Figure 4) and with number of districts (Figure 5). The statistic plotted is
largest travel time minus smallest travel time divided by smallest travel time, in percentage
terms.
 Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT 49

Figure 5: Maximum Travel Time Imbalance (with 12 cars)

Note that the average travel time for a district is the result of averaging times across all dis-
patches to atoms in that district, which will include some served by cars from other districts;
a different concept is average travel time for a car, which is the result of averaging across all
of that car’s dispatches, only some that are to atoms in its own district. Not surprisingly, when
the number of cars or number of districts is small, the travel time imbalance between districts
is relatively small. Looking at the equal-area curve in Figure 4, we see that as the number of
cars grows beyond 8, the imbalance increases sharply. With 14 cars, the difference between
the biggest and smallest district travel times is nearly 600% of the smallest time. The equal-
CFS line in Figure 4 shows that if the districts are drawn with roughly equal CFS rates, then
the imbalance is smaller, remaining at about 100% until the number of cars exceeds 12 and
then growing to between 200% and 324%.
Figure 5 shows how the travel time imbalance varies when the number of cars is fixed at
12 and the number of districts changes. Again, the imbalance increases much less if districts
are defined to equalize CFS rather than area. In either case, the imbalance is less than 15%
until the number of districts exceeds four; but then the imbalance grows to nearly 400% in the
former case, whereas in the latter case, it stays at not much more than 100%. Clearly, if we
want to minimize travel time imbalance, we should define districts on the basis of CFS, and,
if we want to keep the imbalance less than, say, 50%, the number of districts will have to be
less than seven.

Workload Imbalance
Travel time averages and differences are not the only important characteristics of police
deployment. Planners also care about workload imbalances. From the point of view of the
police officers, the issue is whether some have heavier workloads than others. From the point
of view of citizens, a car that is not responding to a call is patrolling, and that in itself is a valu-
50 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

Figure 6: Maximum Workload Imbalance (number of districts = number of cars)

able service to the public. Often, there are demands for more frequent patrols in some part of
a city. So both officers and citizens want their car to have a lighter load.
The Desktop Hypercube measures the workload for each car in terms of percentage of
time spent responding to calls (including both travel time and on-site time). Because average
10
service time (an input parameter) is constant, and travel time is small relative to on-site
time, we could also measure a car’s workload by number of calls. The maximum workload
imbalance is defined to be the largest workload minus the smallest workload. In these New
Britain calculations, the average workload falls gradually from 76% to 30% as the number of
cars is increased from 6 to 15. Figure 6 shows that initially, the effect of adding more cars is to
sharply increase the maximum imbalance. That is, when there are few cars, workloads are
high and there is not much difference between cars, but as the average workload falls, the
imbalance increases. If there are districts, once the number of cars exceeds 8 or 9, the size
of the increase in the imbalance diminishes considerably. When districts are drawn with
approximately equal areas, the maximum imbalance remains between 33% and 43%, once
the number of cars reaches 9. When districts are drawn with approximately equal CFS
rates, the maximum imbalance remains between 18% and 27%, once the number of cars
reaches 8.
Changes in workload imbalances are quite different when I hold the number of cars fixed
at 12 and gradually increase the number of districts. Figure 7 shows that the maximum imbal-
ance falls, and falls more for equal-CFS districts. The surprisingly high (50%) imbalance
when there is only one district (i.e., there are no districts) is due to the fact that in that case, all
atoms have the same dispatch preference vector, namely, 1, 2, . . . , 12. Consequently, Car 1 is
everyone’s first choice and gets a heavier workload than all the others. With districts defined
by CFS, the busiest car is responding to calls between 83% and 49% of the time, whereas the
workload of the least busy car varies between 34% and 21%. Clearly, the lesson is that to
minimize the workload imbalance, we need to increase the number of districts to 12 and
 Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT 51

Figure 7: Maximum Workload Imbalance (with 12 cars)

define them in terms of CFS. Examination of a broader measure of workload inequality

(standard deviation) leads to the same conclusion.

Patrol Frequency
The third important criterion for optimal district design is patrol frequency. Because
patrolling is what cars do when they are not responding to calls, patrol time and workload
are essentially two sides of the same coin: Reduce a car’s workload and you increase its
patrol time. Even if a car remains parked at some high-crime location, we can think of it
as patrolling that location. Patrol time, however, is not the same thing as patrol frequency.
If district workloads are equal, then district times for patrolling will be equal, but the fre-
quency with which a car passes any particular location will vary from one district to
another because some districts have more miles of road than others. That is, one car that
patrols 20 minutes out of each hour may pass along each of its streets more often than
another car that also patrols 20 minutes out of each hour. If we want to have equal patrol
frequency for all atoms, we will have to have greater amounts of patrol time (and hence a
lower workload) for those districts that have more miles of streets. The Desktop Hyper-
cube keeps track of street miles in each atom and therefore can calculate patrol
frequencies.
The data show that the regionwide average patrol frequency is about once every 3
hours and varies only slightly as changes in the number of districts alter the distribution
of patrol time among cars. There are, however, large imbalances across districts. With
districts drawn to make CFS rates approximately equal, the imbalance (defined as larg-
est minus smallest divided by smallest) reaches nearly 600% at 10 districts. With dis-
trict lines drawn on the basis of area, the imbalances are generally smaller, always less
than 300%, and the maximum imbalance is at 12 districts. These smaller imbalances
52 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

Figure 8: Interdistrict Dispatches (number of districts = number of cars)

are understandable because districts with nearly equal areas are likely to have approximately
equal numbers of street miles. Hence, if we want to minimize patrol frequency imbalances,
we should draw district lines on the basis of area, not CFS. A broader measure of patrol fre-
quency differences among districts—standard deviation—also indicates that imbalances are
generally larger and more volatile if districts are based on CFS.

Interdistrict Dispatches
In many police departments across the country, including Hartford, Connecticut, the con-
cept of community policing has received much attention. The basic idea is that officers
should be familiar with the people and the problems of the areas where they work. It is impor-
tant that when a citizen calls for help, the officer who responds is the one who has that famili-
arity. This requires that cars patrol specific neighborhoods rather than an entire city. There-
fore, we want to know how often calls within each district are handled by the officers
assigned to that district.
Part of the output of The Desktop Hypercube is percentage of dispatches that send a car
out of its district. Figure 8 shows how that variable changes as I increase the number of cars.
Not surprisingly, the more cars available, the fewer are the number of times when a call is
handled by an officer unfamiliar with the community: The percentage of interdistrict dis-
patches falls from about 70% when there are only 6 cars to less than 40% when there are 15
cars. Note that the percentage is slightly lower when districts are drawn to equalize CFS
rather than area. The message for police planners is the more cars the better and that district
lines should be drawn on the basis of CFS.
Figure 9 shows an opposite trend: If I hold the number of cars fixed and increase the
number of districts, the percentage of interdistrict dispatches grows but only up to about 6 or
7 districts. That is, initially, the more finely I divide up the city, the more often a caller will
 Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT 53

Figure 9: Interdistrict Dispatches (with 12 cars)

find that its own car(s) is/are busy, and it will be served by a car from another part of the city.
However, as the number of districts increases beyond 7, the percentage of interdistrict dis-
patches does not change much. Note also that in general, the equal-CFS curve is slightly
higher than the equal-area curve. The lesson seems to be that, if we feel strongly that officers
should get to know their districts, we might as well have 12 districts, and they should be
drawn so as to equalize the area they cover.
I have used The Desktop Hypercube to calculate expected values for four important mea-
sures of police performance. I have made those calculations repeatedly as I varied the
number of cars, the number of patrol districts, and the way I draw the districts. Graphing the
relationship between performance criteria and number of cars and districts enables me to
make a number of generalizations for the city of New Britain.
These generalizations are not consistent in their implications for optimal design of patrol
districts; for example, some suggest that districts have equal areas, and others imply equal
CFS rates. Therefore, police planners will have to use their judgement in making trade-offs.
Furthermore, in other cities, different geography and different patterns of crime and acci-
dents may require other strategies. Any police force with a modest, off-the-shelf personal
computer and good data on the locations and duration of its CFS could use The Desktop
Hypercube to design patrol districts that enhance the efficiency with which it deploys its
11
cars.

Summary of Generalizations Based on New Britain Data

1. If there are no districts, then regionwide average travel time does not change as the number of
cars increases. This result is due to the fact that if all cars patrol the whole city, then they all have
the same expected location.
2. If each car has its own patrol district, there are opposing logical arguments with respect to the
effect on average travel time of varying the number of cars. For any given caller, some cars patrol
54 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

exclusively nearby, but others patrol exclusively far away. Which car is sent depends on which
ones happen to be busy at the time the call is received. Calculations made by The Desktop
Hypercube indicate that 11 cars or 9 cars minimizes regionwide average travel time for districts
designed to have roughly equal areas or equal CFS rates, respectively. The latter results in lower
travel times.
3. If the number of patrol cars is fixed and the number of districts varies, we again encounter oppos-
ing logical arguments: The more finely I divide the city, the closer each caller is to having his
own car but the more distant are some other cars. In New Britain, the former argument prevails
up to about five districts, and after that the latter does. Average travel time is minimized at about
six districts.
4. When the number of cars or number of districts is small, the travel time imbalance between dis-
tricts is relatively small. But as the number of cars grows beyond 8 (for equal-area districts) or 12
(for equal-CFS districts), the imbalance increases, especially for districts based on area.
5. With a fixed number of cars, travel time imbalance increases with number of districts, especially
when they are defined in terms of area.
6. With a fixed number of districts, as the number of cars is increased, workload imbalances
increase, but at a decreasing rate, up to eight districts. The imbalance is considerably larger with
districts of equal area rather than equal CFS rates.
7. Holding the number of cars at 12 and increasing the number of districts, workload imbalances
decrease, especially if districts are defined on the basis of CFS.
8. Patrol time and workload are essentially two sides of the same coin: Reducing workloads
increases patrol time. Hence, increasing the number of cars reduces average workloads and
increases regionwide average patrol frequency. Furthermore, changing the number of districts
will not affect total patrol time. However, patrol time is not the same as patrol frequency, and
unchanging aggregate patrol time may hide significant imbalances across districts. The maxi-
mum imbalance is at 10 or 12 districts and is larger with equal CFS rates. On the basis of this cri-
terion, unlike most of the others, optimality requires that district lines be drawn on the basis of
area.
9. In cities that emphasize community policing, interdistrict dispatches should be minimized. If
the number of cars is fixed and the number of districts increases, the percentage of interdistrict
dispatches grows up to about six or seven districts and beyond that does not change much. The
implication is that not much is lost by going beyond six districts and that they should be drawn so
as to equalize the area they cover.

NOTES
1. The national average salary for entry-level police officers is more than $29,000 per year. Adding 54% for
fringe benefits and multiplying by 5.2 officers to keep the car on the road 7 days a week would bring the cost to more
than $232,000 if all officers were paid only entry-level salaries. The car itself would cost something as well.
2. Or until an officer begins working on the case, if some investigative action is appropriate before going to the
scene.
3. I calculate centroids from the definitions of the atoms: I have the longitude and latitude of each vertex of the
polygons that define them.
4. I do not present here Larson’s mathematical model in full. A few of the conclusions are stated to give the
reader a sense of the theory underlying the empirical work that is the focus of this article. The interested reader is
referred to Larson (1974); Larson (1975); and Larson and Odoni (1981), chapter 5. The computer software devel-
oped by Larson and Sacks is described briefly in nontechnical terms in Sacks and Grief (1994).
5. Larson (1975), p. 852, eq. 3.
6. Larson (1975), p. 860, eq. 22.
7. Larson and Odoni (1981), p. 325.
8. Mapinfo is widely used software that, among other things, will attach longitude and latitude coordinates to
street addresses.
9. For numbers of districts that are not evenly divisible into 12, some districts are given more cars than others so
that all 12 cars are patrolling somewhere. The extra cars are given to districts that have higher CFS rates or bigger
areas.
10. The computer model is capable of using different service times for different districts, or even different
atoms, but not for different types of calls.
11. The Desktop Hypercube software is available for a fee from the author.
 Sacks / OPTIMAL SPATIAL DEPLOYMENT 55

REFERENCES
Larson, R. C. (1974). A hypercube queuing model for facility location and redistricting in urban emergency ser-
vices. Computers and Operations Research, 1(1), 67-95.
Larson, R. C. (1975). Approximating the performance of urban emergency service systems. Operations Research,
23(5), 845-868.
Larson, R. C., & Odoni, A. R. (1981). Urban operations research. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Sacks, S. R., & Grief, S. (1994). Orlando magic: Efficient design of police patrol districts. OR/MS Today, 21(1),
30-32.

Stephen R. Sacks is a professor of economics at the University of Connecticut. His bachelor’s degree is from
Harvard, his master’s degree is from the London School of Economics, and his doctorate is from the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley.