Greensboro has 683 authorized sworn police officers and currently has 611 fully trained sworn police officers out on the streets.
The recent staffing study completed by Police Department in conjunction with the Greensboro Budget and Evaluation Department recommends that Greensboro have 16 additional authorized police officers, which would raise the full staffing level to 699.
City Councilmember Justin Outling said that the staffing study, “Indicates that leadership thinks the most effective use of money now is the salary increases.”
The staffing study used Durham, Fayetteville, High Point and Winston-Salem for peer comparison and notes that Durham and Winston-Salem are the two most similar cities in “demographics and police structure.”
The memo from the Budget and Evaluation Department also states, “Of the peer cities surveyed, Greensboro is the only city without 1:1 patrol car to officer take home program.”
This means that in all the comparison cities patrol officers are assigned their own car and in Greensboro patrol officers share cars, which is also an issue in recruitment.
The Greensboro Police Department loses about 60 officers a year, mostly through retirement, but also resignations, dismissals and other causes.
The GPD typically holds two training classes a year, so for the department to remain at current staffing the recruit classes need to graduate about 30 officers. The current class has 18 recruits and, according to Police Chief Brian James, the department has 11 officers who recently graduated from the academy and are in field training.
It takes over 10 months for a recruit to complete the police academy and field training.
Adding 16 authorized positions to the Police Department won’t have an immediate effect on the number of sworn police officers in the department, but Outling noted that the amount of overtime James requests is based on the budget for police salaries. Increasing the number of authorized officers would allow James to authorize more overtime without going over budget.
Although it was stated at the City Council work session that James could request more overtime, James reiterated that he requested overtime based on his budget, so immediately increasing the number of authorized officers would allow James to pay more overtime, put more officers on the streets immediately and stay within the budget.
Outling said, “I’m going to encourage the council to take action on April 6. There is no reason for further delay.”
The study and your article both fail to mention that ALL of the cities in question, except for Greensboro of course, have a take home car program. Not having to drive a personal car to and from work is a big cost savings, effectively additional pay for officers that work for those agencies.
To be fair, GPD does allow officers to drive a police car home during their work week, but they have to either leave their personal car at the station or bum a ride back and forth at the beginning and end of each week to get/leave their patrol car. Not only is that tedious, but it shows once again how GPD has fallen behind other agencies. It’s also another fine example of the City of Greensboro’s half measured responses.
People expect something nearing perfection from our officers, but no one wants to value them that way. In fact, the City of Greensboro values the people that you expect to defend and uphold your rights and safety at about $18 an hour. You get what you pay for Greensboro.
A full-time take-home car is a HUGE benefit; not just in convenience but in cost. It’s generally estimated as a $3,000 annual compensation benefit (although in most scenarios I believe this to be a bit high).
A take-home car allows you to keep all your gear where you want it and know how to get to it easily. It saves a ton of time at shift change, and just generally makes life as an officer a good bit more pleasant. It also encourages officers to live in or near the city as most cities have limits on how far a take-home car can be driven from the city to an officer’s residence.
As Jack points out below, you get what you pay for in this life; and law enforcement isn’t paying for good quality officers anymore in NC outside of CMPD. We need to allocate sufficient funds to pay for top-quality decisionmakers with excellent critical thinking skills and emotional maturity. But, that doesn’t come cheap.
Hey looks like you updated your article to include the take home car stuff. Thanks Hammer!
More police officers will not make psychopaths and sociopaths go away.
Something is wrong with society in general. Wanna be safe. Go live in a super max prison! I don’t want to live in lockdown, much less a supermax prison.
A whole lotta sense in a few words.
Don’t worry, Jack. They can’t hire enough police to hold their current numbers, let alone any extra. It’s just a backhanded way to give GPD more money for overtime. What a great solution. You know, like a band-aid to fix a broken leg. Good thinking Council.
The overtime that no one is working? The overtime that sergeants are now authorized to work because they cannot get anyone to sign up? The overtime rate for new officers that is less than they can make working off duty where they do not have to answer calls?
For those keeping up, that’s 88 vacancies and climbing at present. Recruiting for any law enforcement agency has to be the 2nd hardest job in the country nowadays. Right behind translating for President Biden.
You think I would risk my life, and put up with the B.S. & abuse for $18/hr?, $25/hr? Nope.
Staffing level of 699 is more than before, but it sounds like a bone. More officers on duty is what really matters.
It makes a lotta sense to me to allow officers to take their cars home when they are off. First, they could go directly to a crime scene or emergency directly from home. But more to the point, a city or county sheriff’s car parked in my neighborhood would make everyone around feel a lot more safe.
So what if they pick up a few items on the way home, or stop on the way to work, all on their own time? What business would not want a police car in their parking lot for a bit?
That’s usually allowed from what I understand. An officer is actually encouraged in some cities to use their car to run errands on off time, provided that they are ready to step in as an officer if need be and that they stay within their jurisdiction. Because, you know, it makes sense to trade a little bit of city gas for free security for whatever business is being patronized and acts as a force multiplier for the agency. In GSO, those that have take home cars, like detectives, can use them for small errands while traveling to and from work, but can’t make it their run around town car, although I imagine some of them do. Hey as long as they step in to save me if something goes down, I have no problem with it.
My expectations are low.I still have faith in most of our leadership to disappoint, though.
The current climate of hate for law enforcement has ALL agencies short staffed.
Allotting 16 more officer positions does nothing to alleviate the inherent problems stemming from having 72 unfilled positions already. When I first got into the business in 2002, GPD, GCSO, and HPPD had dozens of applicants for every position that came open; now these agencies can’t even get enough qualified applicants to fill the openings they have.
Without a vocal majority of our society supporting law enforcement and pushing back on all the hate thrown at them, we’ll never get back on top of this problem.
Ben, we get half baked solutions because they don’t want to solve the problem. To paraphrase another post, city council doesn’t want crime fighters anymore. They think cops are too aggressive. They want politically correct huggers armed with teddy bears who are ready to hand out courtesy tickets reminding you to be a good citizen. They want mask enforcers and curfew monitors. They want personal protectors for the social elite, and for city council themselves (because they wish they were elites), but not for you. For you, they want you to sit down and keep quiet while your city is fed to the loudest voices of the social justice brigade. No, there is no room for policing here. We fine citizens of Greensboro have made our safe-space beds, dressed ourselves in our gender-neutral underwear, and now we have to lie in them next to the people we elected to office while murderers rain havoc across our once great city.
“Without a vocal majority of our society supporting law enforcement and pushing back on all the hate thrown at them, we’ll never get back on top of this problem.”
I’ll shout my support for law enforcement when I see them doing good in our society.
I guess you better get out on patrol then Marha. Cops doing good things, answering hundreds of calls a day, tens of thousands of calls a year just in Greensboro, millions of calls answered nationwide, without incident does not make news and rarely gets noticed. You only hear about the occasional bad incident that becomes a nationwide “blame all cops” game, but I bet you’re not really hoping to see them do good. No, you’re waiting and hoping to catch one stepping out of line so you can blame them all for it.
Seems that they have surplus cars to give the IRC.
16 whole officers eh? You guys know that just in patrol there are 4 patrol districts, not counting downtown. Each of those districts is made up of 8 squads. Let’s see…. four times eight is 32… plus downtown… carry the one… Ah got it! If my cyphering is correct, 16 extra officers divided into 32 squads, which excludes the new Tanger District, um, I mean downtown, equals an extra one half of an officer per patrol squad. That should stop the crime wave that’s about to hit. Now that’s government math for you.
That 16 is on top of the current 40+ vacant positions.
I don’t get what the big deal is about allowing officers driving their cars home. Seems like to me them being out and about would be a deterrent. I don’t see anybody having a problem with the Fire Dept. doing it.