June 27, 2025 1 min read
Navigating Holiday Scheduling in Law Enforcement: Insights and Tools for Agency Leaders
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Featuring insight from Ret. Sgt. Doug Kazensky
Holidays are a time for celebration, but for law enforcement, they also bring unique operational pressures. Between high call volumes, public events, and officers’ understandable desire to spend time with their families, managing staffing around these times becomes a complex balancing act.
When Public Events Up the Stakes
In addition to normal patrol duties, some holidays include parades, fireworks, and large public gatherings that require more resources.
Sgt. Doug Kazensky (ret.) remembers how in his department, the Fourth of July was mandatory for all personnel. “We had a huge fireworks event at a lake, and every officer was on duty. It was a mandatory workday.”
These events require months of coordination and pose logistical challenges, including:
- Traffic control during and after large events
- Crowd management for thousands of attendees
- Coordination with fire and EMS in case of injuries
- Tactical teams or specialty units on standby
Agencies often develop contingency plans, asking questions like:
- How many officers do we need?
- What are their individual responsibilities?
- What if the weather turns?
- What’s our response plan for disruptions or emergencies?
Coordinating Across Agencies
Multi-agency events often require regional coordination, especially in smaller jurisdictions.
Some departments rely on mutual aid agreements to bring in additional help from sheriffs’ offices, state patrol, or even volunteer reserve deputies. Interdepartmental coordination is crucial, particularly when managing traffic flow on state roads or hosting large-scale events like major parades or community festivals.
Communication must be streamlined. Many departments set a primary frequency, with subchannels for each zone or response team.
Agencies that follow the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and Incident Command System (ICS) typically hold pre-event briefings to assign responsibilities and coordinate response strategies. These help avoid confusion and ensure a unified command.
Why Data is Key When Managing Holiday Schedules
When it comes to staffing projections, past data becomes invaluable.
“The best predictor of the future is the past,” says Kazensky. Departments rely heavily on historical call volumes, incident types, weather trends, and public attendance estimates to forecast staffing needs.
For example, warm-weather holidays like the Fourth of July often see an uptick in outdoor activity, alcohol consumption, and public interactions. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving tends to be quieter, with more people indoors and fewer public events.
Key considerations during holiday planning:
- Expected attendance at events
- Crime trends and historic call volumes
- Anticipated weather
- Overtime limitations or union constraints
- Previous year’s staffing debriefs
Departments that begin planning immediately after an event often have the most success. Annual debriefs help identify gaps, resource shortages, and opportunities to reposition or add specialized units the following year.
How to Equitably Manage Time Off During Holidays
One of the most common challenges departments face is distributing time off around major holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter.
“Everyone wants Christmas off,” says Ret. Sgt. Doug Kazensky. “It’s always a conversation. How do we make this fair and equitable?”
How departments handle holiday leave varies widely. Some rely on seniority-based systems, while others rotate holiday assignments year-to-year. In many agencies, union contracts and collective bargaining agreements dictate the process, requiring administrators to follow agreed-upon rules carefully.
Officers may bid for vacation time in advance, and there’s often a cap on how many people can be off per shift. The key is to be fair while still ensuring the department has enough boots on the ground to meet public safety demands.
How Vector Scheduling Makes It Easier
Modern staffing challenges require modern solutions. Vector Scheduling helps law enforcement agencies streamline holiday staffing, improve transparency, and ensure fair, contract-compliant scheduling.
With Vector Scheduling, agencies can:
- Visualize staffing in real time and maintain compliance with union rules and minimum coverage requirements.
- Streamline vacation bidding and shift selection with automated workflows.
- Easily manage overtime callbacks and backfills without manual tracking.
- Empower officers to view schedules, request time off, and bid on shifts from anywhere via a native mobile app
- Deploy officers dynamically with the new Deployment Module, perfect for large-scale, multi-agency events.
Two powerful features are arriving soon that will give agencies even greater flexibility in managing staffing throughout the year.
The upcoming Hourly Minimum Staffing feature will allow departments to set staffing requirements on an hour-by-hour basis, making it ideal for precisely matching coverage to needs, whether during routine operations or major events.
Meanwhile, the upcoming Shift Bidding Tools will enable administrators to create seasonal or event-based schedules and open them for transparent bidding, reducing administrative workload and helping ensure fair shift assignments across the board.
Do you want to see how it works? Book a demo today, take the first step toward smarter, fairer, and more effective scheduling around holidays and all year long.
