Madison Police still need a dozen or more patrol officers if the department is to meet goals for how officers split their time between responding to calls and work aimed at addressing ongoing public safety problems, according to a new study by the department.

The study comes a year after a consultant’s separate analysis found a shortage of about 25 patrol officers — a gap made up when the City Council voted in 2007 to hire 30 officers after a series of community meetings revealed a sharp uptick in concerns about crime.

Chief Noble Wray said the need to increase patrol staffing from about 199 to between 211 and 224 would be met if the city gets a federal grant that would allow it to hire 20 officers over three years.

But he added that “the way we approach staffing is not just requesting additional officers.”

The department also requires nonpatrol officers to spend some days on patrol duty and next year plans to go from a three-shift staffing schedule to a five-shift schedule in which two “power shifts” — noon to 8 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. — would put more officers on the streets during the busiest parts of the day.

“The transition to the five shift is a pretty significant organizational change for us,” Capt. Vic Wahl told a Tuesday meeting of the Public Safety Review Committee, which reviewed the latest study.

Wahl said the department’s patrol division handled 121,760 incidents in 2008, or 8 percent more than in 2007.

The increased need for officers reflects this increased workload, but Wray said it’s not clear how much of the increase is due to actual increase in work and how much is due to better data collection methods instituted since the last staffing study. This year’s study used the same methodology as the one released last year.

The latest study’s findings also take into account the department’s goal of having patrol officers spend, on average, 28 to 30 minutes per hour responding to calls and 30 to 32 minutes an hour doing “proactive” work, which Wray said includes things such as increasing traffic enforcement in areas that residents have complained about or meeting with residents about public safety concerns.