Des Moines police saythey need 80 more officers to keep calls from piling up.
Why it matters: A police shortage is straining emergency response, but fixing it would require millions of dollars the cash-strapped city does not have.
Driving the news: The department gave the City Council two workload reviews last week, which found that patrol officers spend about 80% of their available time answering calls, above the 60% benchmark used by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA).
- The department exceeded that threshold during 16 of 24 hours and averaged about 14 fewer working officers per hour than recommended.
Zoom in: DMPD was authorized for 375 sworn officers as of December, including patrol officers, supervisors, investigators and those assigned to specialized units.
- Of those, 193 were primarily responsible for answering patrol calls. Patrol would receive most of the additional positions the department is seeking.
The fine print: Police employees applied two national workload models to the department’s 2025 data.
- A U.S. Department of Justice and Michigan State University model found that DSM needs at least 36 additional patrol officers to leave 40% of their time for duties beyond responding to calls.
- The ICMA model examined the patrol’s share of total staffing, hourly workload and total service time.
State of play: Police favored the ICMA-based recommendation of 80 additional officers, including 48 for patrol, because adding only patrol officers would still leave the department short of ICMA’s recommended staffing balance, Sgt. Paul Parizek tells Axios…