Paul Bass Photo
Lt. Luiz Casanova with Chief Esserman at CompStat.
Top cop Dean Esserman officially requested changes to the current year’s city budget in order to fully staff all car beats, double the number of walking beats, and double the size of Internal Affairs.
The official request appeared on the agenda of the Board of Aldermen’s Monday night meeting. The matter was referred to committee, where it will be subject to a public hearing.
The proposed budget amendment is the first part of a two-phase plan, designed to unfold over the next three years, to increase the strength of the department. The increase request is the fulfillment of a promise by Mayor John DeStefano.
The proposed amendment also includes a measure that would create a new “community communications manager,” which would, in part, help the police department enter the Twitter-sphere.
The amendment would allow the department to fill the 467 positions for sworn officers for which the department is budgeted. It can’t currently do that because of complications caused by rules covering “underfilling.”
The measure would not spend any money that’s not already budgeted into the current fiscal year’s spending plan.
With a sworn officer force of 467, according to Esserman, the department will be able to do fully staff all car beats, increase walking beats from 20 to 40 and put pairs of cops on them day and night in 10 districts, restore school resource officers and staff the Police Athletic League, fill supervisor and detective vacancies, and double the size of Internal Affairs.
The plan would be to eventually build the department’s sworn strength to 494 sworn officers in three years, Esserman said Tuesday. He introduced the plan at the weekly CompStat meeting with top cops and community members.
City Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts explained the need for the proposed amendment:
Unlike other cities, where a police department might have a pool of money set aside for sworn police officers of all ranks, New Haven’s budget lists the positions by rank.
The police department now has some 70 sworn vacancies it could hire into, but not at the entry level rank. The city can’t hire entry level cops to fill existing vacancies, because they’re at higher ranks. To do so would be called “underfilling.” The city is prohibited from that practice due to a court case years ago.
The city could wait, do promotions testing, and move current officers up into higher ranks and thus open up entry-level slots. It’s choosing not to pursue that route for two reasons: it takes a long time and the city most needs beat cops now.
The alternative the city is pursuing is to seek aldermanic permission to first create 27 officer positions funded at $1 each and then transfer some of the funds marked for now-vacant higher-ranking positions to the entry-level slots.
That would create a department with 494 budgeted police positions (467 plus 27). The amendment also includes a “cap” that limits the number of filled positions to 467, for now. The second phase of the three-year plan calls for the elimination of that cap, sometime in the future.
As with any new city hiring, it will cost money, but the money is all already budgeted as salaries for now-vacant upper-rank positions, Smuts said.
He said he hopes a new class of 27 rookie cops will be seated in May. The cost of the training in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, would be minimal because only a few weeks of the academy would fall in this year, he said. The rest of the cost of training is already written into next year’s budget.
The $1 budget lines — along with the $50,594 salary of the new community communications manager (more on that below) — would come from the “Attrition –- sworn” line in the police department budget. “It’s a line showing how much we’re going to recoup from other positions by them being vacant.”
The city currently has 397 cops, but it’s budgeted for 467. That shakes out to close to $3 million that the city hasn’t paid in salaries this year, Smuts said. That surplus is offset somewhat by the overtime budget, which is up because the number of cops is down, Smuts said.
Board President Perez said the aldermen will look closely at the fine print.
“We support community-based policing. That costs money,” Perez remarked. “That said, we have to make sure we have accountability. The solution to every problem is not to throw more money at it. We don’t want to give anybody a blank check.”
Tweets On The Way
The budget amendment would also create a new civilian position called “community communications manager.” The job would come with a salary of $50,594. The new staffer would work alongside police spokesman Officer David Hartman.
“It’ll affect my job greatly,” Hartman said. “It’ll allow me to get some sleep. It’s basically to supplement my job here.”
Hartman has been focused mainly on media relations and said he has not had enough time to work on “the neighborhood services end of things: block watches, things like that.”
The new community communications manager would also work on introducing social media to the department. The police department would have its own Facebook and Twitter pages, Hartmans said.
“This is a very necessary department to expand,” Hartman said. “It allows us to reach people quicker and better.”
“The chief is really intent on improving relations and communications between the community and the department,” said Smuts. The improvements are “critical to community policing,” he said.