I read the MJM this morning and there’s a story regarding the number of officers we have; specifically that we are short a few officers. The usual question that citizens ask me about the PD is “why can’t we just replace them faster?” The answer to this surprised me the first time I heard it:
Say that you, gentle reader, decided that you want to be a police officer and signed up today. It would be a year before you were in a patrol car by yourself, driving around the City. A year. There is time in the Academy and time spent in on the job training. This lead time makes it very difficult to consistently staff our police department. Even when we are lucky enough to hire officers from surrounding jurisdictions, they still need training on the laws in the City and some on the job training as well. The City has even taken the extraordinary step of hiring more police officers than are budgeted for when the opportunity presents itself because we know that with normal turnover, we are going to need them.
The reasons that we lose police officers are the same reasons people move from any job: pay, location and retirement. We compete fairly well (could always do a little better though) with surrounding jurisdictions when it comes to pay but the 800 lb. gorilla is the federal government. When DHS decides that they need to hire officers, we just can’t compete when cost is not an issue. The feds, after all, are allowed to run as big a deficit as they can stomach – a luxury we don’t have. In addition, we have several officers who have been recalled to active duty in the Armed Forces.
This year is shaping up to be particularly bad: the state is running short of money and the governor has proposed to cut funding that helps fund local police departments and put that money towards universal pre-k. I don’t have a fight with pre-k as it would be a great thing to have but not at the expense of cutting public safety funds.
