By Dana Rieck
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — The St. Louis Police Department’s staffing has hit its lowest levels on record after it lost another 17 cops — almost 2% of its commissioned workforce — over the past month.
The city is budgeted for 1,224 officers, but just 912 of those positions were filled as of the first week in December. After years of staffing woes, that number marks a low point in recorded history for the department.
“I’ve never heard of anything that low,” said Joe Steiger, business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers Association. “When I started back in 1995, there were closer to 1,600 officers, and now they’re down under 1,000. That’s just crazy.”
The agency’s current 25% vacancy rate has strained the rank-and-file as they try to cover three patrol shifts in the city’s six districts. In September, only two police officers were initially assigned to a district just south of downtown, when they both called in sick, leaving the department scrambling.
“If it just takes two or three people being off work to shut a district down, that’s a problem,” Steiger said. “It’s dangerous, not to mention the size of the districts comparative to when there were nine districts. They’re so much bigger now, to have two or three people covering them, it’s just not enough.”
Some neighborhoods, including downtown, have used outside sources to staff police officers to combat high crime levels. They’ll pay city cops to work overtime or contract with private security companies that hire off-duty officers but are not subject to the same oversight as the police department.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ administration “remains steadfast in its efforts to recruit and retain employees across departments,” according to her spokesman Nick Dunne.
At the same time, crime in the city has decreased. Property crimes are down about 17%, aggravated assaults are down 9% and homicides are down by about 22% from last year. Homicides are expected to hit the biggest year-over-year drop in roughly 90 years.
Police staffing levels and crime rates are not always cause-and-effect, experts say.
“There have been research studies that look at levels of patrol and have not necessarily found evidence that just increasing the patrol numbers alone has any sort of crime-reducing effect,” said Kelsey Cundiff, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “That’s not necessarily universal.”
Spokesperson Monte Chambers did not respond to a request to speak with Chief Robert Tracy about his department’s staffing levels.
But earlier this year, Tracy tapped the St. Louis Police Foundation, a nonprofit that also provides about one-third of his annual pay, to dedicate almost $1 million to pay city officers $70 an hour to work overtime downtown patrols.
While St. Louis’ population has decreased in recent decades, its police staffing has outpaced the population drop. The city has lost 22% of its residents since 1995, according to figures from the U.S. Census, but it has about 40% fewer cops than it did then.
And after remaining relatively steady with a force of roughly 1,200 over the past decade, according to department data, the pace of police vacancies has quickened. In 2022, the department lost almost 120 officers between January 2022 and January 2023. Since then, about 100 more have left.
Steiger said the numbers don’t account for Jones’ vote in 2021 to cut vacant commissioned positions by almost 100.
Available records go back to May 2011, when 1,268 of the 1,296 positions were filled, said St. Louis police Sgt. Charles Wall. These numbers include all ranks, except the officers who are attending the police academy.
Dunne said there are 30 people currently training in the academy.
Hiring incentives
Despite this year’s low staffing levels, Steiger said the department has slowed the rate of resignations and retirements this year compared with last.
Steiger credited the union’s negotiated pay increases for officers, and Wall pointed to a change in city policy this year that allows the department to pay new hires based on how many years of commissioned experience they have, even if that experience was at another agency.
The experience-pay incentive has brought at least one officer back to the department, Wall said. Another five are in the application process. The city starts newly licensed officers at $53,196 and after a probationary period increases that pay to $54,652.
But, Steiger said, if the department doesn’t turn its staffing woes around in the next two years, it may lose more than 100 officers who will be eligible to retire.
“This is a window of opportunity for them to try to fill in those gaps,” Steiger said. “It they don’t fill those in, they’re going to have a big problem.”
St. Louis isn’t alone. In St. Louis County, where the police department has just 826 of its 961 budgeted positions filled, the situation is much the same: Lt. Col. Juan Cox said last month that about 20% of the county’s officers will be able to retire in the next five years.
The city police department was under state control until 2013, when a statewide referendum put the agency back into the hands of city leadership. Since then, Steiger said the city has been heavily involved in the department’s hiring process and argued the bureaucracy and red tape in the process slows down hiring an applicant, allowing time for other agencies to “pluck” that officer.
Tracy was at a union meeting last week, Steiger said, but did not outline a specific recruitment plan.
Tracy posts a monthly statement on the agency’s website, and in October, he asked residents to help recruit officers and said the department is offering existing employees $500 if they refer candidates who graduate from the police academy.
“We are always looking at different things to do as it relates to recruiting,” Wall said Wednesday.
Wall did not know whether the agency currently has full-time recruiting staff, as it has at other times. During those times, staffers would travel to colleges and job fairs in an effort to attract new officer hires — much like Atlanta Police Department’s (unsuccessful) hiring event in downtown St. Louis last month.
“I think it shows people how desperate all these police departments are,” Steiger said. “I’d like to see the city be a little bit more desperate, too.”
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