Chief Ernest Brown said he utilizes past experience in Chicago to increase efficiency, effectiveness of Darien Police Department, including changing late-night and summer staffing.
Ernest Brown marked his first year as Darien’s Chief of Police last week. And in his initial 12 months in the position, Brown has brought some big-city thinking to small-town Darien. Soon after the 28-year veteran of the police department for the City of Chicago took the reins as chief in Darien last November, he began working with his staff to evaluate the department’s resources in an effort to improve its overall efficiency. After extracting data from the police department’s records, Brown saw a pattern beginning to emerge. He noticed that the peak times for call volume is usually between 3 p.m. and 2 a.m. But Darien officers’ shifts were typically spread out evenly over the course of the day. “Not to denigrate the officers’ self-…
The chief's intent with the analysis is to find ways to more effectively allocate resources, he said.
The typical Darien police officer spends about 47 percent of the workday responding to incidents, Police Chief Ernest Brown said Monday while presenting a summary of his department workload analysis. That leaves a little more than half the day to be used for other activities, such as training and proactive police work, he said. “The workload analysis is not intended to suggest that we have way too many officers,” he said. “It’s a way to look at how we allocate officers and how we can best use the discretionary time we do have.” Discretionary time, he clarified, is not the same as free time. Rather, it’s time that officers can spend patrolling for traffic violations, for example, or working through law enforcement problem solving exercises…
41.766785
-87.953114
Darien Police Department
1702 Plainfield Rd, Darien, IL
/articles/chief-ernest-brown-releases-summary-of-workload-analysis
1352117
/locations/6730807
Brown said he plans to analyze staffing from an eight-month period by March.
A number of officers told Chief Ernest Brown last fall that they believed he was brought to Darien to cut police jobs, Brown said during Thursday's Police Committee meeting. While he is reviewing the police department's staffing practices, he said the analysis is not a means to justify trimming officers. “The more appropriate use of this is to make sure we are staffing in the most appropriate way and allocating resources in the most appropriate way by looking at the data clearly,” he said. The workload analysis released earlier this week is just the first step in a comprehensive review scheduled to be completed by March. That analysis will cover an eight-month period that spans from May 1—the date Darien switched its police dispatch …
41.766785
-87.953114
Darien Police Department
1702 Plainfield Rd, Darien, IL
/articles/police-workload-analysis-first-step-in-comprehensive-staffing-review
1352117
/locations/6133651
Mike Minardi
8:39 am on Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Good article more ›