Crime in Washington, D.C. is a persistent problem, and the impulse to put more boots on the ground to deter it is understandable—an instinct reflected in a years-long hiring push by the city’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). Still, as a recent MPD management audit points out, where those boots are deployed and what they do when they get there matters much more than sheer volume. A separate audit of the workplace dynamics inside MPD helps explain why obvious improvements have been difficult to achieve. Using publicly available data on reported crimes and staffing, along with the findings of MPD’s own audits, we argue that city and agency leaders already have many of the tools they need to meaningfully reduce crime.
Washington faces a familiar but urgent challenge: how to deploy its police resources in a way that matches the city’s actual public safety needs while making the most of limited personnel. Current staffing patterns leave some communities saturated with patrols while others, often with higher levels of urgent calls, operate with lean coverage. This imbalance stems not from neglect or bad faith, but from staffing formulas rooted in historical patterns rather than contemporary demand. Changing this approach will require both operational courage and political will, but the payoff in responsiveness, efficiency, and fairness could be substantial.
The MPD’s sworn force lost a sixth of its size over the past decade. The strain of generational attrition—as the officers hired during the crime boom of the 1990s retire—has been aggravated by early exits among disaffected younger officers. Hiring can help, but recruiting, training, and fielding a new officer takes time, and even generous signing and retention bonuses have had little immediate impact. With no quick return to peak staffing, the city must maximize the capacity of the officers already on the roster. That requires a clear picture of where officers are deployed, how they spend their time, and whether those assignments align with the city’s most urgent public safety needs.
Police workload disparities across Washington, D.C. are conspicuous. In 2024, officers in PSA 302 (Mount Pleasant) handled 1,096 reported crimes. By contrast, officers in PSA 105 (Buzzard Point/Southwest Waterfront) dealt with just 273 crimes—yet staffing levels in both areas were roughly the same. Citywide, the busiest PSAs (those experiencing 1,000+ crimes) averaged about 38.5 crimes per officer, compared to only 11.3 crimes per officer in the least busy (those with fewer than 200 crimes). In other words, officers in high-demand areas shouldered three to four times the workload of those in low-demand areas. This is an allocation problem, not an effort problem. It produces the paradox residents see every day: in high-demand areas, calls stack up and response times slip; in lower-demand areas, patrol presence is visible even when call volume is low.
Addressing this imbalance requires the willingness to move personnel where they are needed most. A PSA experiencing a sudden 20 percent rise in violent calls should not wait months for relief. Even reassigning one or two officers from a lower-demand PSA can relieve pressure and cut response times. These adjustments do not have to be permanent nor do they have to be impromptu; they can be made seasonally or in response to emerging crime patterns. The point is to treat staffing as a flexible resource, not a fixed allocation.
Patrol capacity is also strained by the way shifts are structured. Some overlap between outgoing and incoming shifts is necessary for briefings and equipment changes, but in certain districts it lasts up to an hour, while in others it is only 30 minutes. That extra half hour, multiplied across three daily shifts, amounts to 90 minutes of lost patrol time per position each day. Over a year, the difference amounts to the workload of several full-time officers. Standardizing overlaps to the shortest effective duration could recapture thousands of patrol hours annually—without hiring a single new officer.
Sworn capacity has also drifted away from front-line work. Since the end of fiscal year 2016, the number of officers ranked lieutenant or higher rose from 184 to 216, a 17 percent increase, even as overall sworn staff fell by roughly 17 percent. During the same period, about 80 sworn officers have been added to centralized support roles, meaning that 14 percent of the force are now tied to a desk. That shift is the equivalent of removing several PSAs-worth of patrol officers from neighborhood beats. In a constrained environment, these changes matter. Restoring even a portion of these administrative officers to patrol, and staffing more senior officers on patrol beats could make an immediate difference in visible presence and call response.
Specialized units and investigative teams are another important part of the equation. These assignments often have high value, but their staffing should match current workload and measurable impact. If burglary cases in a district drop from 300 to 200 per year, investigative staff levels for burglaries can be reduced, with those officers reassigned to more urgent needs. Conversely, when violent crime cases have high solvability and the potential to prevent future harm, investigators should be concentrated there. The same principle applies to citywide specialized teams: if they face long idle periods, some members can be detailed temporarily to patrol during peak demand.
These redeployments are not without trade-offs. Pulling investigators into patrol may slow complex casework. But when calls are stacking up in a high-violence PSA, the immediate benefit of more officers on the street can outweigh the longer-term cost. The key is to continually assess where the next officer hour will have the most public safety value.
Civilian staff can also expand capacity. Trained civilians can process evidence at certain non-violent crime scenes, handle administrative tasks, or provide technical investigative support. This frees sworn officers to return to patrol or other critical duties more quickly. If even a modest share of non-patrol work shifts to civilians, the effective patrol strength of the department could rise significantly without hiring more sworn officers.
The same logic applies to call handling. Not every reported incident requires an in-person officer response, and not every response needs to be immediate. Clear triage criteria, paired with streamlined reporting tools, can shorten the time officers spend on each case and free them to respond to high-priority calls. If reducing paperwork and handling lower-priority incidents by phone allows every officer to take one extra call per shift, the city could respond quickly to hundreds more calls each week without expanding headcount.
Shifting officers between PSAs or away from specialized units can prompt resistance from those affected and from their union. Officers may see temporary reassignments as disruptive to their routines, disconnecting them from familiar beats or limiting opportunities for career advancement in specialized roles. The union may frame these moves as eroding the shift bidding process and negotiated staffing protections or as unfair burdens on particular districts.
To address these concerns, leaders should focus on transparency, fairness, and clear performance measures. Officers should see the deployment criteria, understand how workload is measured, and know that assignments are based on objective demand rather than favoritism. Any redeployment plan should begin as a pilot, with clear start and end dates and a commitment to evaluate results in partnership with officer representatives. Involving officers directly in shaping the deployment metrics can help build trust and secure buy-in for longer-term changes.
Leadership can also reduce resistance by coupling redeployments with professional development opportunities. An officer temporarily assigned to a high-demand PSA could receive targeted training in crisis response or investigative interviewing that adds to their skill set. Recognizing these assignments in performance reviews and promotion processes can turn what might be viewed as a burden into a career-building opportunity. Officers already in supervisory roles should understand that walking beats with the rank-and-file is an expected and valued part of their workload.
Finally, communication with both the public and the rank-and-file should be consistent: the message is that deployment is being adjusted to meet immediate safety needs, and that all neighborhoods deserve a fair share of police attention based on actual calls for service and workload. Over time, as officers see that redeployments are data-driven, time-limited, equitable, and tied to career opportunities, the initial resistance is likely to diminish.
Ultimately, every officer hour must be invested where it delivers the most benefit to public safety. That means questioning long-standing allocations, measuring current performance, and moving resources as needed. It also means resisting the temptation to preserve assignments for tradition’s sake when the data show the need has shifted elsewhere.
While no single adjustment will solve D.C.’s staffing challenges, a set of coordinated steps, including balancing PSA workloads, standardizing shift overlaps, aligning specialized staffing to demand, expanding civilian roles, and improving call handling, can produce a meaningful increase in effective capacity. These are operational improvements that can be made now, without waiting years for new hiring. They require leadership willing to face short-term pushback in service of long-term gains in safety and equity.
By embracing this approach, Washington, D.C. can make better use of the officers it already has, improve response times where they matter most, and provide more equitable coverage across neighborhoods. The result will be a department that is more agile, more responsive, and more capable of delivering safety for all residents–not just where it’s easiest, but where it’s needed most.
