BALTIMORE — Baltimore’s top cop is pulling out all of the stops trying to hire new officers and to hold on to the ones he’s got.
“We have $10,000 signing bonus, $5,000 incentive for education. We have a tax break for those who live in the city. We’re starting a more robust take-home vehicle program,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley.
But, at a quarterly progress hearing on the consent decree at the U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Baltimore, a lack of officers was cited as the main thing holding up progress.
A department operating with two thousand employees needs six hundred more in spite of its success at reducing homicides and non-fatal shootings in the city.
“I don’t worry about it, because the staffing numbers are what they are,” said Worley, “We can continue to try to build, and I think as long as we can show that we’re doing the work and we’re basically satisfying those paragraphs, the staffing will eventually come up and we’ll satisfy the consent decree.
The judge overseeing this process says when he first began some seven years ago, the police department was a train wreck, and he says its transformation since then has been nothing short of remarkable.
It’s a point not lost upon Mayor Brandon Scott.
“If you or someone said to you the White House would be lifting up Baltimore as an example of how to reduce violent crime in the city, people wouldn’t believe it, but that’s where we are today,” Scott said earlier this week.
But the judge added that the department must add to its ranks and can no longer endanger too few officers covering too many shifts, calling inadequate staffing the court’s number one concern.
