22 - POLICE DEPARTMENT STAFFING AND OPERATIONS

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• 2 Officers are still on light duty for work related injuries. We continue to recruit minority candidates and women to be more reflective of our community. In a force of 60 officers, we have 4 Hispanics, 3 African Americans and only 1 female. Our outreach for minority recruitment involves local community leaders and churches. We have sent recruiters to college campuses and job fairs in other cities. We do not do well as we are in direct competition with agencies with higher salaries. With probationary officers completing training recently, the staffing of our patrol division has made the filling of positions in the department. One Lieutenant was moved to the vacant Professional Standards office and 2 officers have been moved to the Criminal Investigation Division with one of those being assigned to drug investigations only. It is important to note that minimum staffing in uniform patrol has to be a priority. We staff for historical call load and these minimums are needed for appropriate response and officer safety. As more of these officers become available for full duty, officers will be rotated in one position in the Criminal Investigation Division. Over the last several months, we have experimented with a different method of officers volunteering for off -duty work each month. As you remember our original procedure was allowing officers to sign by department seniority and up to 4 jobs monthly. What we tried: Signing by seniority, but signing for only one job and after all present had an opportunity to choose, repeating the process. Drawing a lottery number for first, second, etc. position to sign, limited to four jobs. Signing by seniority, but signing for only two jobs and after all present had an opportunity to choose, repeating the process. The lottery method was probably the `fairest' of all the methods we experimented with. It presented a problem in that several of the officers who would have had seniority under the old method, complained about their seniority now not counting for anything. These were not staff officers but those officers in the `middle' of the pack so to speak. Allowing to sign for only one job and repeating the process took a long time. At the end of the various signing processes used, off -duty jobs were still available and more concerning were the details posted for OT needed by the department, were left unfilled if not for some of the command staff officers. The January 2016 posting contained 56 opportunities for off -duty jobs. Of the 56 positions, 8 were not signed for. 3 positions were signed for by two