Understanding current costs of police services requires an understanding of past costs and past demands for police services. This research explored how demands for police services from the RCMP in British Columbia varied over the past 30 years and whether the amount of work necessary to respond to calls for police services increased or decreased. This is a study of police capacity, that is, the quantity of cases that can be handled by police responding to calls for service. If overall police members’ time to handle a call were to decrease, then police capacity would increase and the number of calls for police service could increase with the expenditures remaining the same. If the time it takes to handle a case were to increase then police capacity would decrease and fewer cases could be handled with the same number of police. If police capacity decreased at the same time that demand increased then serious operational decisions might have to be made, either limiting demand, or increasing the number of police, or reducing in the work done with respect to any given case.
