Officers will continue to leave force before new ones graduate The District’s police department says it is reopening the police academy to beef up its force to more than 3,900 sworn officers over the next year after a funding mix-up halted the training of new recruits this year.
However the Metropolitan Police Department’s attrition rate is expected to continue siphoning off the police force for six more months before the newly graduated officers can begin hitting the streets, meaning the actual number of officers with badges will remain roughly stagnant.
Mayor Vincent Gray told the D.C. Council on Wednesday that the green light for the city to finally hire more cops came after months of concern that the Metropolitan Police Department’s force could dip below 3,800 officers — a level Chief Cathy Lanier has called troublesome. The department currently has a little more than 3,800 officers and says it is losing an average of 15 a month to attrition.
The police academy reopens Monday for a class of 35 recruits, and their training lasts six months. A new class will begin each month until 300 officers are hired, Gray said. The new cops from the first of these classes will hit the streets by April 2012 at the earliest.
However, police union head Kristopher Baumann noted that six months of graduating officers from the training academy would add approximately 180 officers to the force from April to the end of the fiscal 2012 in September.
Meanwhile, the rate of 15 officers per month leaving the force would total 180 officers by the end of September 2012. That could put MPD right where it started by the end of the next fiscal year — short of 3,900 officers.
“And that’s if everything goes perfectly,” said Baumann, who added that the last graduating class of officers before the shutdown in February of this year took 11 months to finish training.
A spokeswoman for Lanier said “recruit officers are counted and paid as part of MPD’s authorized sworn strength” and “often take part in some police activities” after initial training. Therefore the nearly 200 officers in training count toward the force.
The $10.8 million more in next fiscal year’s MPD funding comes from extra revenue found by the city’s chief financial officer in July through a budget revision. An oversight on the department’s 2011 budget that included underfunding benefits and longevity pay squeezed MPD’s budget this year and forced cuts like police academy training.
