Baltimore Police commissioner says the city is facing shortage of 230 officers and calls for more boots on the ground amid surge in shootings
The Baltimore Police Department is facing a staffing shortage of about 230 officers amid a nationwide spike in shootings and violent crime, including 18 homicides in the Maryland city over the past 10 days.
Police Commissioner Michael Harrison addressed the staffing issues in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on Tuesday, during which he noted that the department was at its biggest last year and budgeted for 2,648 this year. However, they had an approximate 10 percent decline and are now at 2,400.
According to the Baltimore Sun, the city has experienced 162 homicides so far in 2021 — 10 more than this time last year. Another 329 non-fatal shootings have been investigated, compared to 280 at this time last year, according to the police department.
Baltimore's staffing shortage is part of a larger trend in cities across the country, as officers have been leaving departments in droves amid protests calling to defund the police and an uptick in crimes against cops.
The Baltimore Police Department is short about 230 officers below its budgeted 2,648, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison (pictured) said Tuesday
Harrison addressed the staffing issues in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper
The New York Police Department is down about 1,500 officers after 350 left last month and retirements jumped to 2,600 in 2020 as opposed to 1,509 in 2019, a department spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
The Chicago Police Department lost over 700 officers since 2019, according to data The Epoch Times obtained from the department. In Minneapolis, 105 officers left the department last year, which is more than double the average attrition rate, according to city records. The Los Angeles Police Department lost nearly 600 officers since 2019.
And in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed said last month that she will fund at least 1,224 full-duty officers to patrol the city despite that number hovering in the mid-900s and continuing to drop with officers retiring, leaving for other police departments or simply leaving the profession altogether, Tony Montoya, head of the city’s police union, told Fox News.
As for Baltimore, Harrison told Tapper: 'We're using every resource available, we're using all the time to force up and plus up the numbers so we could have more officers,' Harrison told Tapper. 'It's not just about law enforcement; it's community engagement. We need to build those relationships because we need the community's help to help us solve these murders so we could hold these bad actors accountable for terrorizing our community. That has been working better this year, but we need more of it now.'
Harrison, who became the department's 41st commissioner in 2019, has pioneered a number of community policing programs in Baltimore.
While acknowledging the nationwide spike in crime, Harrison said that Baltimore is seeing a unique uptick in the amount of domestic violence and close acquaintance shootings. 'People just have absolutely poor or no conflict resolution skills and are using guns to solve their conflicts,' he said.
This includes an early May crime in which a man burned down his house and shot dead three of his neighbors. It is still not clear what led to the violence on the residential street in suburban Baltimore, authorities said. The shooter, Everton Brown, 56, was fatally shot by police after killing Sara Alacote, 36, Sagar Ghimire, 24, and Ismael Quintanilla, 41.
Harrison spoke on CNN ahead of President Joe Biden's Wednesday announcement of a crackdown on guns that the administration believes is driving the crime surge sweeping the nation.
Asked what he would like to see Biden address, Harrison said, 'I would like to hear about more resources and actual boots on the ground in our big cities.' He added that Biden should take a multi-faceted approach to combatting the crime wave as opposed to pinning it on one issue. 'It's not just one thing,' he said. '. . . it's programs, it's money, it's resources, it's technical assistance . . . '
Biden already announced plans to ramp up gun control laws as he unveils a 'zero tolerance' policy to firearm dealers who fail to comply with federal law - their license to sell will be revoked on the first offense.
Baltimore far outpaces the national average in violent crimes and murder, according to the latest data released by the FBI in September 2020
There were 17 homicides in the first few months of 2021, according to the most recent statistics from the Baltimore Police Department. There were 18 homicides in the past 10 days
Crime fluctuated in the beginning of 2021, as seen in Baltimore Police Department statistics
Homicides rose 30 percent and shootings spiked by eight percent in large cities last year and the problem remains rife. In New York, shootings are up 188 percent compared to his time last year, while homicides are up by 750 percent.
There have also been more than 230 mass shootings this year, including at a Fedex facility in Indianapolis and at massage parlors in Atlanta. Biden has addressed the nation after these shootings, calling violence 'an epidemic in America' and promising to take action against it.
Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based Democratic consultant, told the Hill that crime 'could be the issue that, frankly, makes it impossible for Democrats to hold on to the House next year.' She argued that too many on the left 'don't understand that crime and disorder are unacceptable to the entire population. People will lie to pollsters and go into the voting booth and vote for the person they think is going to protect them.'
In early May, Everton Brown, 56, burned down his house and shot dead three of his neighbors in a residential street in Baltimore
Two others were injured in the fire that Brown set, destroying his house
And while Democrats blame guns and restlessness from the coronavirus pandemic for the rise in crime, Republicans blame the 'defund the police' movement and calls to from progressives to redistribute funding from law enforcement toward social services and community engagement programs.
Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America said: 'It is the height of hypocrisy for Joe Biden to demonize guns, gun dealers, and gun owners. For the past year, the anti-gun Left looked the other way when rioters were destroying cities and murdering civilians and cops.'
'Not only that, the anti-gun Left began releasing criminals early from jail and started defunding the police in several big cities. The police were vilified so badly that they began retiring early in droves. Others took extended time off work or suffered from the 'blue flu', he added when speaking to the Washington Examiner.
But the White House said on Tuesday that Biden's Wednesday address will most likely not clash with ongoing negotiations over police reform legislation.
'Yes, there needs to be reforms of police systems across the country, the president is firm believer in that,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. 'But there are also steps he can take as president of the United States to help address and hopefully reduce that crime.'
The president is also announcing plans to let cities and states use $350billion of COVID funds to hire more law-enforcement, even if it raises the total beyond levels from before the pandemic. The funds set aside from the $1.9trillion American Rescue Plan can also be used to invest in new technologies and crack down on gun traffickers.
