Consultants tell Bluffton leaders department is largely effective but urge changes to dispatch coding, policy and workload tracking

Consultants from the Center for Public Safety Management told the Law Enforcement Citizens Advisory Committee and the town council that their recent assessment of the Bluffton Police Department found low crime rates but several operational gaps that, if addressed, could improve response times and workload accuracy.

"All of our recommendations are based upon the data that we collect, legal considerations, best practice, as well as our experience," said Jared Borguane, a retired police chief and consultant with CPSM, during a presentation summarizing a roughly 205-page report that includes 98 recommendations. He said the study combined CAD data analysis, interviews and on-site observations.

The consultants presented indexed comparisons showing Bluffton's violent and property crime rates well below state and national averages, but they flagged an average priority-1 response time of about 11.5 minutes (dispatch processing roughly 3.3 minutes and travel about 8.2 minutes). "The industry standard ... is closer to 5 minutes in total," Borguane said, adding that the high average in Bluffton likely reflects overly broad county priority coding rather than solely local travel-time problems.

CPSM recommended working with the county dispatch to refine priority coding so that only true life-threatening incidents are labeled priority 1, which would make the town's high-priority response metrics more meaningful. The firm also urged the town to improve CAD logging so routine administrative and report-writing time is captured: consultants estimated that fully recorded administrative work could add an approximate 10 percentage points to measured officer workload.

On staffing, CPSM explained the "rule of 60" (about 60% of sworn staff should be assigned to patrol and overall saturation should remain under 60%). The report found that, excluding 13 school resource officers, patrol positions comprised about 51% of sworn assignments and the average saturation index during high-demand periods was about 49%, below the 60% threshold but close enough to merit attention as the town grows.

The consultants also recommended organizational clean-up: updating the policy manual (including a subscription service with built-in legal review and attestations), implementing a formal succession and training matrix, realigning misassigned duties (for example, moving FTO oversight away from an emergency-management lead), and adopting rotational investigator assignments.

CPSM credited the department with implementing some recommendations already: updating sections of the policy manual, subscribing to a policy service, formalizing internal affairs/professional-standards oversight and reducing sworn vacancies from six to four. "Significant progress" has been made, Borguane said, while noting several recommendations remain for implementation.

Council members and staff asked multiple operational questions, including whether shared jurisdiction or Beaufort County dispatch practices affect response-time measures. The chief said available units are typically dispatched to the nearest call and jurisdictional ownership is clarified on scene; CPSM said that joint dispatch practices and priority-coding choices can inflate average priority-1 times in the dataset.

The report and discussion also raised an operational recommendation to address false alarm volume and consider an alarm-registration/fine structure to reduce unnecessary responses and free officer time for proactive work.

The committee did not take formal legislative action on the report at the meeting; CPSM said it would provide further detail and staff would follow up on specific implementation items.