Estimating the nature and scale of response police demand

This study explored how routinely collected police data can provide insights into the types of incidents police respond to and demands those incidents place on available resources. The team analysed data describing ‘emergency’, ‘priority’ and ‘standard’ graded incidents attended by West Yorkshire Police between 2017 and 2022 across the Bradford District. They explored several approaches to quantify the nature, scale and patterns of demand in the region. The time response officers take to resolve an incident varies considerably depending on the type of incident and even across incidents of the same type. This indicates that measures of demand based on numbers of incidents alone are likely to hide more complex patterns of demand. Analysis demonstrates that response demand is highly concentrated across the district with some areas experiencing disproportionately high levels of incidents which require considerable resources to resolve. These patterns, accompanied by high degrees of variability in the nature of demands observed, underscore the importance of data-informed, place-based resource allocation strategies.