Many Ohio cities have cut police force

Springfield up 3 officers from 2007; Urbana down 14 percent.

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8:16 PM Saturday, June 25, 2011

By Tom Beyerlein, Ken McCall

and Kelsey Cano

Staff Writers

The thin blue line has gotten thinner.

A Springfield News-Sun/Dayton Daily News examination of police staffing statistics shows Ohio has lost 3,223 officers, or 8.4 percent of its forces, since the pre-financial meltdown year 2007, a reduction that police union officials say is endangering both officers and the public.

The Springfield Police Division bucks the trend, going from 125 full-time sworn officers in 2007 to 128 in 2011, a 2.4 percent increase.

But the department is still understaffed, officials warned.

“The men and women officers want to be proactive in solving crime in the neighborhoods, but that’s extra manpower,” said Springfield police Chief Steve Moody.

“A lot of what we do is reactive, and that’s not what we’re about,” Moody said.

The examination also shows that police departments in the region vary widely in manpower compared to the number of citizens they serve, which is one benchmark for police staffing.

“There’s certainly no doubt that the current economic crisis is having an impact on police staffing,” said Ohio Fraternal Order of Police President Jay McDonald. “We’ve reached a critical point — not just across the state, but across the country. There’s no more ‘doing more with less.’”

Area police chiefs interviewed said they are still getting the job done, even as their forces in many cases have declined. Their budgets tightening, some cities are stretching their police dollars by cutting non-essential services, implementing longer shifts, making greater use of volunteers and adding technology.

“You have to face the fact that this country is facing tough economic times, and you have to do equal or more with less,” said Urbana interim police Chief Matt Lingrell, whose department has lost 14 percent of its force since 2007. “We have a motivated work force that’s dedicated to the city, and we’ll do whatever our budget allows us to do.”

Experts say there are many factors involved in determining proper staffing, including community demographics and crime rates. But one yardstick is the officers-per-thousand ratio. The FBI said the average number of officers per thousand for the part of the Midwest that includes Ohio was 2.3 in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

In Springfield, despite the staffing increase, the officers-per thousand ratio is 1.7, and in Urbana, it’s at 1.6. Sheriff’s offices are not calculated into per-thousand ratio, as they contract with townships and other small communities, making it nearly impossible to determine from statistics how much of a population a sheriff’s office serves.

Timothy Freesmeyer, a former cop who founded Etico Solutions Inc., a police staffing consulting company based in Illinois, said it’s his experience that short-staffing is a nationwide problem.

“We’re pretty much convinced that police agencies are short-staffed across the country,” he said. “The money is really getting much tighter. That puts the onus on the chief. They can’t just walk into the city council meeting and ask for more officers.”

Police agencies are dealing with the pinch in a variety of ways, Freesmeyer said. Some are no longer responding to minor incidents, going from 8-hour to 12-hour shifts to reduce non-patrol down time like hours spent in roll call, and eliminating special programs of questionable effectiveness like DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). High-tech equipment like red-light traffic cameras and computerized dispatching systems help enforce the law with fewer officers and reduce redundancy in paperwork functions.

“A lot of agencies don’t do things they used to do,” Freesmeyer said. “That has political ramifications: When people call the police, they expect an officer to respond. But if the tax money isn’t there, you have to focus on the highest priority calls. Agencies have to think more like business people than like paramilitary organizations. You’ve got to look at return on investment. We’ve got to tighten ship. ‘Close enough for government work’ isn’t close enough anymore.”

Lingrell said Urbana’s department is “trying to do our part to find ways to cut money and do things just as well,” including cutting overtime, no raises for contracted officers and adjusting schedules to have more officers on duty during busier times.

Since staff reductions, there hasn’t been a large increase in officers being injured while on the job, but Lingrell cautioned that could turn quickly.

“You just need one bad situation — If you had more officers on duty, the likelihood of something bad happening goes way down. We should have a concern. It’s important to have as high a staffing as you can have,” he said.

Both Urbana and Springfield’s police departments are funded through levies, but they aren’t as effective as they once were.

“That’s under stress too ... (Springfield’s police levy) is based off property taxes, and we all know where the housing market’s been for some time,” Moody said.

In Urbana, a levy that provides funding for the fire and police departments is generated through an income tax. In 2007, about $1.23 million was generated through the levy, and in 2010, about $993,000 was generated, or a $234,000 decrease.

With local funding cuts from the state looming, Moody said he’s in almost constant contact with Springfield’s city manager and finance director to see how the department may be affected.

“We’re all doing more with less to begin with, and it’s impacting us already. That’s the concern,” he said.

Ohio FOP President McDonald said for many departments, that’s no longer possible.

“Public safety is the reason that government exists and the essential service that government provides,” he said. “(Public officials) have to have that in mind when they’re determining their budget.”

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