Cyber Cell Workload: Can the 15-Day Target Be Met?
The cyber cell of a district police unit in Haryana logged 480 complaints in a 30-day month. Of these, 55 per cent were financial-fraud complaints, 25 per cent were social-media and obscene-content complaints, and the remaining 20 per cent were miscellaneous complaints such as hacked social accounts and lost or locked devices.
Past records give the average investigation time per complaint as 6 hours for a financial-fraud case, 3 hours for a social-media case and 1.5 hours for a miscellaneous case. The cell has 6 investigators. Each investigator delivers 6 productive investigation hours per day (the rest goes to court duty, briefings and paperwork), and each works 25 days in the month.
The Superintendent of Police has promised the public that every complaint will be disposed of within 15 days. Before the monthly review, the inspector asks you to work out whether the sanctioned strength can deliver on that promise and, if not, what to ask for.
1. Calculate the total investigator-hours required and the hours available. What is the shortfall, and how many additional investigators of the same productivity would close it?
Read the worked answer
Step 1 - complaint volumes. Financial: 55% of 480 = 264. Social media: 25% of 480 = 120. Miscellaneous: 20% of 480 = 96. Check: 264 + 120 + 96 = 480.
Step 2 - hours required. 264 x 6 = 1,584; 120 x 3 = 360; 96 x 1.5 = 144. Total = 2,088 investigator-hours.
Step 3 - hours available. 6 investigators x 6 productive hours x 25 days = 900 hours.
Step 4 - gap. 2,088 - 900 = 1,188 hours short. One additional investigator supplies 6 x 25 = 150 hours a month, so the requirement is 1,188 / 150 = 7.92, which rounds up to 8 additional investigators, taking the cell to 14.
Why round up and not down: 7 extra investigators give 1,050 hours, leaving 138 hours - about 23 financial-fraud cases - uninvestigated. Since the SP's commitment is a disposal promise, the rounding must serve the promise, not the budget. Note also that the 2,088-hour figure is a monthly workload; the 15-day disposal promise is achievable only if cases are triaged and started early in the month, not queued to the last week.
2. One in four financial-fraud complaints now needs 4 extra hours for device or server forensics. Recompute the requirement and state how many additional investigators are needed now.
Read the worked answer
Step 1 - affected cases. One quarter of the 264 financial-fraud cases = 264 / 4 = 66 cases.
Step 2 - extra hours. 66 x 4 = 264 additional hours.
Step 3 - revised total. 2,088 + 264 = 2,352 hours.
Step 4 - revised gap. 2,352 - 900 = 1,452 hours. 1,452 / 150 = 9.68, which rounds up to 10 additional investigators, for a total strength of 16.
Reading the result: the forensics requirement alone adds two posts, because 264 hours is close to two investigator-months of 150 hours. A weaker answer treats the 66 cases as 66 hours - forgetting that each case consumes 6 hours even without forensics - or adds 4 hours to all 264 cases, which overstates the demand by a factor of four. The useful supervisory point is that the marginal cost is not spread evenly: forensics-intensive cases should be triaged to the two investigators trained on imaging and server requisitions, or the cell will keep paying the 4-hour penalty on cases it could have routed once.
3. The SP asks whether 12 investigators, at 6 productive hours a day over 30 days, can clear 100 per cent of the original 2,088-hour workload within the month. Answer with figures, and give one non-staffing measure that would reduce the demand.
Read the worked answer
Capacity of 12 investigators over 30 days: 12 x 6 x 30 = 2,160 hours against a requirement of 2,088 hours. That is a surplus of 72 hours, i.e. utilisation of 2,088 / 2,160 = 96.7 per cent.
Verdict: arithmetically yes, operationally fragile. A 72-hour margin is about half of one investigator-day per person across the month. It disappears the moment anyone takes leave, attends court, or the monthly inflow rises by 3.5 per cent - 17 extra complaints would consume it. And if the forensics load from the previous question applies, the requirement becomes 2,352 hours against 2,160, a deficit of 192 hours, so the answer flips to no.
One non-staffing measure: triage at intake through the national cybercrime portal - auto-flag the low-value, no-money-trail and device-only complaints for online self-help or community mediation, and route them out of the investigator queue, while fast-tracking financial-fraud cases to the bank-freeze stage within the golden hour. Freezing beneficiary accounts early also cuts investigation time, because a recovered amount ends the case faster than a chase across three jurisdictions. Demand management buys more than an extra post here, and it can be started this week.