Mayor Rawlings-Blake, Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld Announce New Police Officer Hiring Effort
Mayor’s plan calls for hiring a record 350 police officers next year.
After resolving the worst fiscal crisis in the City’s modern history and restoring critical funding in the Baltimore Police Department budget, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld announced a detailed plan to hire 100 new police officers by the end of 2010 and a record 350 police officers in 2011. The new plan will keep pace with normal attrition rates and fill recently restored positions in the Baltimore Police Department budget.
“Public safety is and will remain a top priority of my administration. With my Comprehensive Budget Plan in place, we have restored every single police officer position in the Police Department budget,” Mayor Rawlings-Blake said. “Now the focus must be on continued, strong hiring efforts to ensure that budgeted police officer positions remain filled.”
The police officer hiring plan calls for additional measures to enhance and expedite the Police Department’s hiring process to keep pace with normal retirement trends including:
- Hiring two additional certified consultants to conduct polygraph screenings;
- Hiring up to 9 contractual employees to conduct background investigations in order to clear a processing backlog of applications from new recruits;
- Create a processing unit by consolidating several smaller units that will track and distribute cases, complete civil service testing, schedule various forms of physical/psychological/polygraph testing, etc. This unit will determine the applicants that proceed to a background investigation;
- Create a third background investigation squad to handle the large volume of applicants. At present there are over 80 cases in the background process and over 120 awaiting the assignment of a background investigator; and,
- The Police Department will implement additional testing opportunities for applicants.
“Despite a very difficult budget situation, Mayor Rawlings-Blake is providing the resources my department needs to ramp-up our plan to hire hundreds of new Police officers this year and next,” Commissioner Bealefeld said.
New Data Shows Pension Debate not Cause of Additional Retirements:
Today, the Police Department also released new data in response to a Baltimore Sun article that suggests a controversial pension change caused an “exodus” of 42 retiring Police Officers in June 2011.
According to the Baltimore City Fire and Police Employee Pension System records, the average number of service years among retiring officers in June 2010 was 25.7 years; higher than the new eligibility threshold implemented by the new pension law. Only three of the retiring officers in June would have experienced changes to their pension benefits under the new legislation. The other 32 would not have been impacted due to the 15 year grandfathering provision in the new pension legislation.
Additionally, in June of 2007, the same number of police officers left the department and in June of 2005 the retirement number was even higher.
“The men and women of the Baltimore Police department have done exceptional job putting sustained pressure on criminals with illegal guns and with this new plan we will continue to ratchet-up our efforts, Mayor Rawlings-Blake said. “For the first six months this year, nearly 1200 dangerous guns have been taken off the streets, homicides are at the lowest level in 25 years and overall gun crime is down 16%.”
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