Police overtime is a sign of some bigger problems

It is not unreasonable to say that the Baltimore Police Department has fallen on some bad times. The latest crisis is the huge amount of overtime expended to keep the streets of Baltimore adequately policed (“As many as 42 percent of Baltimore police officers on patrol last month were working overtime,” June 7). First of all, I would argue that in some cases, even with those overtime expenditures, the deployment is actually less than adequate. There are scientific methods that involve the marrying of numerous statistical databases to devise a formula that accurately projects the manpower allocations to obtain certain levels of coverage. Command has the prerogative to accept, amend, or use that data. Command cannot, however, deploy resources that it simply does not have, thus the “excessive” overtime. Excessive overtime also reflects in eventual “burnout” of officers and offers, as we have now seen, an opportunity for abuse.

As I recall, one former police commissioner was actually contemplating a reduction in the manpower. He thought that we had too many officers per capita, and he was wrong!

Before we indict the department’s command staff — and some certainly are responsible for the present conditions — we need to look deeper into the problem. How can it be that Baltimore is unable to recruit a sufficient number of “qualified” applicants from among its own residents? Is it that the job is so scorned that no one wants it any longer? At one time, youngsters dreamed of the day when they could proudly pin on that badge. Is this a societal rejection of policing? Or is it simply a fact that there are not enough “qualified” applicants?

Every time city officials do a national search for to replace the police commissioner, they contemporaneously admit that the department has failed to develop its own local talent. How sad!