‘Aggressive’ hiring may involve bonuses
BART police to consider bonuses, incentives as officials look to hire additional officers
OAKLAND >> Faced with rising crime, BART directors Tuesday urged the police chief to aggressively recruit new officers and do whatever it can to keep them, even if that means offering higher pay or perks.
The demands come as violent crimes, including rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, are up 41 percent in the first five months of the year compared with the same time period last year, according to the BART Police Department. At the same time, property crimes, such as burglaries, theft, auto theft and arson, are up 14 percent.
Chief Carlos Rojas laid out his plan Tuesday to beef up hiring and improve officer retention. The agency is short 39 officers out of a department budgeted for 176, or roughly 21 percent of its patrol force. That’s a challenge, especially for a district as geographically diverse as BART, he said in an interview last week.
“We have a system that has over 100 miles of rails, and it covers four counties, soon to be five counties,” Rojas said. “So, it’s a very challenging task, and we do need more human resources.”
Rojas told the directors that his department would try to speed up the hiring process, offer a $1,000 referral incentive to employees who suggest an applicant that ultimately gets hired, and increase its marketing efforts.
The department is also considering offering $10,000 to $15,000
hiring bonuses to officers, though Rojas admitted that money for those incentives had not been included in the budget adopted in June.
“It’s something that’s a work in progress, and it’s something I’m going to try to push forward with,” he said. “It’s not something that is budgeted for, but I’m hoping it will receive a positive response and we can get some funding for it.”
The push for more officers comes amid public outcry following several high-profile robberies involving groups of minors boarding trains. And it follows a startling increase in the number of rapes and sexual batteries reported on BART, with seven rapes reported on BART property from January though the end of June this year, compared with four in 2016.
There also has been a notable spike in reported sexual assaults, with 28 in the first six months of the year, the same number reported for all of 2016.
“I hear all the time from (riders) they want to see officers on the train, they want to see officers in the stations, and they want to see more officers in the parking lot,” BART Director Joel Keller said at Tuesday’s meeting. “I recognize that if you’re understaffed, that’s a very difficult thing to accomplish.”
He called the officer shortage “a systemic and chronic problem” and urged the department to be more aggressive in recruiting new officers. He asked the department to more closely track its applicants to determine whether there are points in the hiring process where applications get bogged down, resulting in fewer officers being brought on board.
But Rojas said the number of applicants is down significantly. The department received 750 officer applicants last year, a 75 percent decrease from 2013, when it received 2,945, Rojas said.
It’s not just BART that’s facing a chronic shortage of officers. Gardena police Chief Edward Medrano, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, said the shortage persists statewide. With tenured officers retiring at an accelerated rate, competition among departments for a small pool of qualified applicants, and increased public outcry at the wrongdoing of officers, Medrano said the combination of factors has made it increasingly difficult for departments to hire and keep officers.
“It’s a trifecta,” Medrano said, “and not a good one.”
It’s not just up to officers to stem crime, Rojas said, and the agency is looking at other ways to thwart would-be criminals. It plans to invest some $3 million on a mix of solutions to stem fare evasion — what BART Director Debora Allen called the “gateway crime” leading to more serious offenses on the system. Those solutions include hiring community service officers to check passengers’ tickets on the trains, purchasing video-analysis software to more closely scrutinize how patrons abuse the system, and installing taller barriers around the paid areas of stations to deter gate-jumpers.
On Monday, BART unveiled an upgraded entrance at the Downtown Berkeley station with some of the taller barriers installed. The $2.4 million project included a new fare gate that only accepts Clipper cards and a locked service gate that automatically opens in the event of an emergency, BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said.
Up next are the Richmond, Balboa Park and Concord stations, which will see improvements in the next two years, she said, as well as the downtown San Francisco stations.
Rebecca Saltzman, who heads the agency’s governing board, said the board isn’t always informed of trends in certain types of crimes. The board receives a quarterly report, but those reports look at the overall crime level only and often are a month or two delayed. She asked the chief to begin providing more detailed, monthly reports to the board, which he agreed to do in a memo released last week.
Also as promised, the agency is once again sending out daily curated email reports on police calls at BART, which describe in short paragraphs the reported crime and the department’s response. After coming aboard in late May, Rojas had ditched the reports in favor of using an online crime-mapping tool, but some members of the board said the new way of presenting crime information was less transparent to the public.