The Peanut Butter Theory of Police Staffing

By Brian Thiem

Years ago, when I was working Homicide in Oakland, the department initiated another reorganization to address rising crime amid budget cutbacks. They moved units and responsibilities around and shifted resources from one part of the city to another. They decentralized investigations to make detectives accountable to neighborhoods and later moved all investigations back under a centralized investigative command structure for greater efficiency.

One of our homicide investigators was especially profound one day as we all sat around with our morning coffee working out the problems of the department, the law enforcement profession, and the world. He introduced, in an especially philosophical manner (we homicide detectives were deep thinkers about the human condition and society’s ills), the peanut butter theory of police staffing. It goes like this—if you are given a big gob of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, you can either slather all the peanut butter on one slice of bread, or smear a little bit on a dozen slices. But no matter how you spread the peanut butter, it doesn’t change the amount of peanut butter you have.

In press conferences around the country, we hear police chiefs and local politicians during crime surges announce that they will increase police patrols. Working cops cringe when they hear that. Do regular citizens really think police departments have a bunch of police officers sitting around the station doing nothing, just waiting for a crime spree so they can put on a uniform and go to work?

For a multitude of reason, which I won’t get into here, most police departments today are understrength, and most law enforcement professionals recognize the authorized (budgeted) strength of most departments is insufficient to meet the needs of their communities.

So, when police chiefs “increase patrols,” I always wonder where the officers are coming from. Sometimes, patrol officers are shifted from one part of the city to another. For instance, a few officers might be pulled from every police district and sent to District 5 to address the rash of violent crimes plaguing that area. Although that might help the immediate crime problem in District 5, the rest of the city is now shorthanded. They are not able to handle the calls for service in a timely manner and do little or no preventative patrol. Thus, crime increases there. It becomes like a game of whack-a-mole, where crime pops up in the districts with fewer police, and officers are pulled from other areas to address that, and the process continues in a never-ending battle. Remember, there is a limited amount of peanut butter.

Other times police chiefs announce officers are “pulled from the building” and put back in uniform to address the rising crime. Few departments today have sworn officers doing clerical work—those positions were civilianized decades ago. Therefore, the chief might pull detectives and put them back in uniform, which means some cases will never be investigated, leaving suspects unidentified and at large to continue to burglarize houses and cars, or to rob, rape, and murder citizens.

Or in-service training might be cancelled or postponed—critical training on hot-button topics such as handling mentally ill subjects, force de-escalation, active shooter response, or racial bias. Most of the police misconduct instances we see on the nightly news can be attributed, at least in part, to inadequate training, and policing experts agree that officers need more training, not less. Whenever officers are moved to patrol from other units, some important police functions will not be accomplished. And in the long-term, the communities suffer.

There’s no simple (or cheap) fix to dealing with rising crime, but “increasing patrols” or “pulling officers from headquarters” is not a long-term solution. That’s because, no matter how you spread the peanut butter between the slices of bread, it does not change the amount of peanut butter.