The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is grappling with a significant staffing crisis, with officer numbers plummeting to an all-time low, as per police data.
This comes amidst a backdrop of increasing departures from the force, a trend that the department has found challenging to counteract, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The department, which is budgeted for 1,224 officers, is currently grappling with over 300 vacancies. "Ive never heard of anything that low," Joe Steiger, the business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, told the Post-Dispatch. "When I started back in 1995, there were closer to 1,600 officers, and now theyre down under 1,000. Thats just crazy."
The number of officers in the police department has been on a steady decline since 2020, according to SLMPD data. The force started 2020 with just over 1,200 commissioned employees, but this number fell to 1,198 in January 2021, and further dropped to less than 1,130 last year, as previously reported by Fox News.
In August, the Post-Dispatch interviewed over a dozen former St. Louis police officers who cited reasons such as unmanageable workloads due to staffing shortages and a lack of political support for their decision to leave the force. Among these, five retired, two transferred to other police departments, and eight quit policing altogether.
Steiger warned of the potential consequences of these vacancies. "This is a window of opportunity for them to try to fill in those gaps," he said. "If they dont fill those in, theyre going to have a big problem."
In an attempt to address the staffing crisis, SLMPD Chief Robert Tracy urged community members to assist in recruiting officers in October. The department also introduced a $500 incentive for employees who refer someone who successfully completes the police academy.
Despite being one of the cities with the highest murder rates in the country in recent years, St. Louis has seen a decrease in crime, even amidst the police staffing challenges. Homicides, which peaked at 263 in 2020 and surpassed 200 in the last two years, decreased by 26% year-over-year as of the end of November, according to SLMPD data. Robberies and aggravated assaults also saw a decrease of 7% and 10% respectively.
However, Steiger maintains that staffing remains a critical concern, as low numbers could potentially endanger civilians and lead to officer burnout.
He cited an incident in September 2023 when the department had to scramble for replacements after the only two St. Louis police officers assigned to a city district both called in sick. "If it just takes two or three people being off work to shut a district down, thats a problem," Steiger said. "Its dangerous, not to mention the size of the districts comparative to when there were nine districts. Theyre so much bigger now, to have two or three people covering them, its just not enough."
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