By Adam Pagnucco.
Yesterday, I posted an analysis of the county executive’s recommended police department budget that noted it did not contain a net increase in sworn officers. That generated a comment on Twitter from one of the county government’s top public safety officials. Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Earl Stoddard wrote:
Adam, having been directly involved in the discussions around this, context matters. There are more than 100 sworn officer vacancies right now even after graduating a class of 21 less than 2 weeks ago. The next class begins in June and under a best case scenario would add 40-60 more officers. Assuming the next class that @mcpnews can offer in early 2024 is as successful and we don’t lost more officers in FY24 than are currently scheduled to retire, then maybe we make a substantial dent in the current vacancies.
But that still doesn’t have us in a position to grow the number of sworn officers in FY24 beyond the budgeted level. The CE has already made clear that if we can somehow fill multiple classes a year, we will, but adding positions that you know you cannot fill isn’t solving the public safety issues we face. There is no question we need to grow the department. The CE supports that. But we also need to recognize the realities of a large number of existing vacancies and the long lead time to train and deploy new officers.
I respect Stoddard. He is no politician or spinmeister. He is an emergency management professional and is one of the top people in the executive branch. What he is essentially saying is that the county’s police staffing problems are too severe to fix in any one budget.
I believe he is right but county officials could see this coming. County council public safety analyst Susan Farag has been issuing repeated warnings about police staffing since at least 2019. Last month, she followed up with five more shocking facts that comprised one of my top ten stories in February. And let’s not forget that the county eliminated 29.5 full-time equivalent positions in the police department in FY22, most of whom were sworn officers.
So this leads to a question – not to Stoddard, who is not the key decision maker on this and deserves credit for telling a tough truth. Rather, this question is directed to his bosses and the elected officials:
How did we let things get to this point?