“We used to have a missing person cold case squad, and just two weeks I disbanded that to put them back into regular homicide and regular assault squad because we don’t have enough regular detectives,” Chief Rick Smith said.
In March, outside of arrests, not a single sexual assault case involving an adult victim was assigned to a detective, according to documentation provided by a Seattle Police employee to a local NPR outlet.
In June 2020, city council passed legislation that mandated Philadelphia only hire people – including aspiring police officers – who have lived in the city for at least one year prior to the job appointment.
The push to hire more civilians comes on the heels of moving more than 100 sworn members of the department from specialty roles over to patrol.
“Los Angeles is safe,” LAPD Chief Michel Moore said. “The efforts of our contingency planning to ensure that we have sufficient staffing so that our patrol units are available to handle not just emergency calls, but urgent and routine calls, is present.”
The department is more than 1,000 officers short of authorized strength — even after Mayor Lori Lightfoot balanced her 2021 budget by, in part, eliminating 614 police vacancies.
The state requires that all new officers go to the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training, and the academies the officers are required to complete are held at certain times with limited enrollment.
Oakland, CA, police chief LeRonne Armstrong on Tuesday praised a new proposal by the mayor to unfreeze dozens of positions and beef up his department’s staffing after a wave of killings and organized robberies across the city.
"They're just throwing everything and the kitchen sink out there in the hopes that it's going to keep murders from going past 850 this year," said 15th ward Ald. Ray Lopez.
Over the next minute, the dispatcher and another unidentified officer tell Rine the whole shift is working late. Rine: “33 Henry - I’ll be going upstairs to fill out my resignation letter then.”
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