Brentwood Council Takes First Steps Towards Increasing Police Force

After a report was provided by Brentwood Police Chief Mark Evenson on police staffing levels, the Brentwood City Council decided to move forward with a series of actions that will expedite the hiring of additional police officers while taking into consideration long-term planning.

Currently, Brentwood has budgeted a police force of 62-sworn positions. Currently, the city only has 50 officers due to a variety of reasons (injury, leave, position changes, 4850 time).  This means Brentwood is actually understaffed by about 12-officers which means a reduction in proactive police measures to keep Brentwood safe.

One of the biggest challenges the council will face in the future is the idea of overstafffing in order to prevent this from occurring again–a trend of hiring more officers to ensure numbers stay above the “average” so that service is not effected to the public. Walnut Creek for example has had a policy in place since 1990’s and are just now implementing it–its also a national trend for police departments to hire more officers to protect the community.

“In the event if we catch up, what happens if we have over hiring. What is the consequences?” asked Mayor Bob Taylor.

“We are never going to catch up, in this culture of policing…. It will protect us in the future,” said Evenson.

Councilman Gene Clare agreed with the chief that this concept is something the council should seriously look at and he would support it.

Councilman Erick Stonebarger shared that they should use this as a learning experience to prevent it from occurring in the future.

“I would hope through this process that after it settles down we can look back and see what we could have done differently and start earlier to prvent it in the future… I would hope we can condintue to reduce injuries, but how do we reduce the amount of hours,” said Stonebarger.

Bob Taylor wanted to see some action and get scenarios presented quickly to the council.

“We need a couple scenarios to find out where we are at, where we are going and what could happen. We just don’t hire people, its 5-6 months but it appears to be more than that. Our guys need relief as they are going from jump to jump to jump,” said Taylor.

Stonebarger agreed stating “this is not going to be a simple fix or something fast, but its going to take a couple of council cycles before we get where we need to be.”

Taylor shot back stating the need to act quickly and he wants to be involved to create immediate help to the officers.

Councilman Steve Barr suggested their be two scenarios presented which were immediate and long term scenarios.

“To me there is two scenarios which include increase staffing. There is immediate concern to mediate fluctuation. Maybe median or long, but there is an immediate need to stop a 10-below position need.  We were close to 62-officers, but had no idea there was 12-positions down. How do we mitigate that?” said Barr. “Second phase, with a long term staffing number and tie it to population or other method, that is a long term solution that will be decided short term and driven financially.”

Barr explained this is similar to the construction industry where they were creating conditions that increase injuries. If one overworks an employees, that could become an avoidable injury becomes an injury. He suggested that if the council takes action to elevate some of the working conditions, they will get rid of the injuries.

“My goal is to make the process as quick as we can and continue to look at an overall plan. How do we get ot the overall goal which is quite a while out. I’d like to see fast tracking if we can,” said Barr.

Vice Mayor Joel Bryant chimed in stating the is three areas of concern that he sees.

1. Ability for over hiring is going to address very effectively the fluctuation issue we have and need to consider this immediately
2. Immediately according to report we need at least 4-additional bodies over and above number we have now. Id like to see 4-aditional bodies to allow chief to move bodies as needed.
3. We need to address the big elephant in the room is the hiring process is that we are in a difficult area to compete with different agencies that have better retirement, medical that we currently don’t have to compete on a level playing field. Maybe we need to look at a hiring bonus like $30k where half up front half at the end of the year to offset some of the medical and retirement at other districts.

“Those are areas I think if we can addres soon, we can take care of this,” said Bryant.

According to city staff, they ask the community understand the timeline for “fast action” is about 8-10 months. On top of that, the hiring process is another 3-5 months.

The council has agreed to look into the following:

• Desire to look at 1.5 officers per 1,000 residents and prepare road map to get their over a period of time
• Immediate concerns for mitigate current staffing fluctuations for short-term/long-term staffing
• Current fluctuations to be looked at sooner rather than later
• Looking at Over-staffing to mitigate future risk
• Addition of 4-bodies immediately
• Looking at implementing hiring incentive/bonus to make Brentwood more attractive through hiring process

The actions will begin in the finance committee after the council agreed it was the best place to speed up the actions.

Steve Barr explained, the finance committee should bring some scenarios back to council while addressing the biggest elephant in room is how we are able to allocate the resources to this goal.

“I suggest the finance committee crunch some number and figure it out. Those on finance committees know this will be a big challenge.  With that said, we know how important that is to make this happen. A plan can be created and show where the cuts and pain will come from to make,” said Barr.

Erick Stonebarger agreed.

“The finance committee has best ability to work through different scenarios to see the cause and effect.”

Vince Mayor Joel Bryant challenged the finance committee to take action and consider the cost of not taking action.

“I ask those on the committee realize that there is a cost with this, there is a price to pay for not doing that with community safety and types of crime that we will pay for.  If we don’t have a safe city, we don’t have people wanting to live in this city and at that point we have bigger problems. We need to consider the cost of not doing it as the price of doing that,” said Bryant.

Actions to be taken by finance committee before coming back to the full council.

• Finance Subcommittee is where the conversation will begin.
• Instead of getting into specific, further define what we are looking at now.
• Hiring to fill gap—immediate gap and look at long-term goals. Come back with short-term, mid-term, and long-term. When you come to short-term, bring it back as soon as possible.

According to the staff report, here is a look at the current staffing levels.

Current Staffing Levels

As of the date of this report, the Brentwood Police Department has a total of 1 sworn police officer vacancy (detective position) and 5 police officers on 4850 time. From an allocation standpoint, the department is operating with 6 sworn positions below our budgeted allocation of 62. However, the actual number of available officers is currently less. The department has recently filled six vacant positions, and these newly hired officers are currently in various stages of training and not ready to work on their own. Three lateral officers are in the field training program and should be working on their own by the end of December. Three entry level officers are currently attending the police academy. These entry level officers will not be done with the academy and field training program until approximately July of 2014.

Having this many newly hired officers in training is contributing to the current staffing challenges the department is experiencing. Chart 5 provides the actual number of sworn police officers positions as of the date of this report to include the subtraction of the 6 new police officers currently in training.

(Click to enlarge the chart)

*The actual number of patrol officers is being shown as 27 due to the temporary re-allocation of resources shown above. As you can see, a total of 4 positions have been temporarily reassigned to patrol from other units. It is important to note that our one current vacancy is a detective who was on 4850 time and medically retired on September 1, 2013. Another police officer is resigning and moving out of State at the end of September. Fortunately the department received the officer’s letter of resignation early, and was able to begin the hiring process on September 1^st to fill both vacancies.

Full Staff Report
http://brentwood.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=35&clip_id=1750&meta_id=146453