This morning, Police Chief Rosie Sizer hit up the city council for $510,776 to cover cop overtime. This is about “making hard choices,” Sizer says, as she tries to juggle a short staffed police force with things like cops’ vacation requests and “the visits that will occur with the fall election cycle,” i.e. providing security for Obama and McCain.
Sizer says she’ll do all she can “to live within our means” with this new money, while the bureau also focuses on recruitment to solve the problem in the long term.
More after the cut.
On that vacation issue, Sizer is talking about the “contractually guaranteed” blocks of vacation time, which police officers request in March, and are approved based on seniority–the bureau is honoring those requests, and they aren’t a problem. But when people have a “last minute request for vacation time,” cop brass has to juggle those requests with people that call in sick, while not tapping the strained overtime budget, which can mean that a last minute request is up in the air until the day the vacation is supposed to begin.
Commissioner Nick Fish is jumping into to ask whether he, as housing commissioner, can help the bureau with recruitment by doing something about housing affordability for officers. “Increasingly it’s becoming challenging,” for officers to live within the city, Fish points out.
Robert King, president of the Portland Police Association, is here to back up Sizer’s pitch–and to ask for more. “This is a solution in the short term to this particular issue,” he says. “But this recruiting and staffing and pay is intermixed for me,” and Portland police pay is slipping, he says. “One of the things we’re concerned about is we don’t begin bargaining for at least 18 months, and we think the recruitment thing is going to get worse,” as long as Portland police officers are comparatively underpaid. “Portland is just simply not competitive,” he says.
Commissioner Randy Leonard, the practically-presumptive future police commissioner, has “a couple of observations” before he votes.
“To be clear, often times we hear criticism that the council has not done enough to allow officers to be hired,” he says, when the truth is the council has funded positions that haven’t been filed. They need to “figure out what is going on with hiring people and getting them into places that are already funded.”
He thinks it’s “our internal hiring process that doesn’t allow us” to scoop up the best and brightest recruits before other agencies do. “I think it’s important to frame the issue correctly as we move forward.”
“If this issue [of overtime funding] that we have tackled in the last week is a precursor, I look forward to us” dealing with the recruitment issue “collaboratively,” he says.
Mayor Tom Potter, the current police commissioner, says the “problems go back a long way… nationally, police departments are having a very difficult time recruiting police officers.” It’s not just a pay issue or process issue, but the fact that people are “giving up what I consider to be good jobs… with excellent benefits.”
“Times have changed in terms of the careers that people choose,” says Potter, a former cop, who adds that he thinks it’s a “wonderful career.”
With that, the council votes to write a big ol’ check to the police bureau.
Could it just maybe be that the PPB policies of the past have alienated citizens to the point that any reasonable person would never consider being a peace officer?
In other words, I do not think that you can pay an educated person enough to work for an organization that is socially despised by their policies and actions.
And the argument about not paying enough. Isn’t the base pay $64,000 a year, full bennies and a pension? Maybe the PPB can’t pay enough compared to Blackwater (who their recruitment pools seems to be competing with).
Lastly here are some for the PPB to “to live within their means”:
1) do something to reduce the payouts of the law suits they settle out of court
2) get more cops on bicycles instead of buying them brand new squad cars to burn gas in
3) does Portland really need cops on horses
4) adopt true community policing principals
City Council Tosses Half a Million Bucks at Police Overtime Problem, yet doesn’t lend an ear to over 2,500 voter’s of Portland who have step foot forward asking to keep the Peterson’s Store on 10th and Morrison?
It was a pleasure meeting with Mayor Tom Potter earlier today and presenting my case along with the pictures and statistics of crime rate in Portland that were approved by the Mayor himself.
However I fear that those statistics will soon go up if they still intend on closing this store and what they have offered the Police Department will all be for not; as that corner on 10th and Morrison will no longer be lit up as before at night and accessible to a great amount of crime unlike now.
Then in order to counteract that the police will have to work even harder to keep up with the rise in crime in that area, patrol it nightly as well as daily, giving them even less time on their hands, and only make them come back and whine for more money and vacation time as they just did.
Pardon me if I’m incorrect but doesn’t that seem like a total loss in tax payer’s money all the way around?
Surely there are more logical ways of spending our money than paying the police to clean up messes that were not made by us but rather caused by the pure desire of wanting to turn our city into something we don’t want in the first place.