But they are now meaningless if as a friend of mine said, he rarely rode his "assigned" beat anyway. And it makes it much tougher to determine from the outside whether a division is properly staffed since you could, theoretically, have a 432A, C and D - with only the first actually riding beat 2, and the other two riding beats 1 and 5. If you want to assign number, then just assign them, and don't try to correlate them to a beat assignment.