I think your question is very poignant because right now this is what police leaders struggle with: How many police officers do I need, and do I have too many or too few?
Again, because I'm proud of the work we've done, and not because I'm trying to suggest we're further ahead than anyone else, in the last five years we've re-engineered our entire organization and introduced a queueing model that enables us to determine exactly.... I can answer that question, and I can tell you exactly how many police officers I need and what I'm doing with them. But the question that needs to be answered is, what do you want us to do? It's not enough to say we have too many or too few, unless we know exactly what our mission is. That's where, in the core of this economic model, rests the community, the governance, the oversight, the values, the principles, and the direction in which we're headed.
To Professor Murphy's earlier point, he is absolutely right that 75% of our patrol response is to non-criminal offences. What we're doing at the national level right now is toying with the idea that while we have uniform crime reporting, maybe we need uniform calls for service reporting as well, so we can really capture exactly the work that's being done.