Police Redistricting and Beat Realignment - 1997 NACo Achievement Award Winner

Background

Over the years, the police service areas have grown to 701 reporting areas, which were organized into 44 beats, and then organized into six districts in this very populous county near Washington DC. Population, subsequently, did not increase uniformly throughout the county, and incidents requiring police services did not happen at an even rate. These factors resulted in some beats serving a disproportionate number of county residents, with unbalanced workloads among officers. To manually balance the workloads and develop a formula for realignment took 5-6 people nearly two weeks. In response, the Montgomery County Police Department, with technical assistance from the Department of Technology and Enterprise Business Solutions, embarked upon a project to realign the department workloads utilizing the existing technology.

Program Development

A request for proposal was issued and a team was selected to develop the system. There are two major components of this system: Beat Realignment and Redistricting. In establishing beat realignment, the system tackles a district at a time. The current beat level workload is displayed one district at a time, as a bar chart along with corresponding graphics. An operator then selects a beat with a high workload and assigns it to a neighboring beat with a low workload. With the click of a button, the revised workload is displayed. To address redistricting, an operator selects a beat and the number of resulting districts. The aggregate workload is initially split equally among the districts. However, options exist to allow the operator to adjust the desirable workloads. This function is used to accommodate various considerations such as interstate highways, municipal boundaries, natural boundaries, and established neighborhood boundaries. The computer-generated districts can be fine-tuned with this program module.