[larrys]

"I don't think larrys was suggesting otherwise, just that it'd be interesting to know "

Exactly.

My feeling is that under the "work expands to fill the time available for completion" Parkinson's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law we would find that the size of that division didn't drop as much as it could (ratio wise) since a detective can always follow more leads. And if those leads led to arrests the labor would be justified. Without regard to whether the extra work was the reason or not.

All this of course assumes also that the staffing level was appropriate to begin with. No way to really know that. After solving crimes in NY Metro is not the same as solving crimes in a different geographic area (travel time or other support resources could be different).