The Fairfax County Police Department plans to hire 100 new positions within a year’s time.
The department hopes to bring on about half of the new hires by the fall, said Maj. Ed Roessler, commander of the administrative support bureau. He said the push is a response to normal attrition and a mass of officers approaching retirement age.
“Mostly right now, we’re just looking at the forecast,” Roessler said. “It’s not that we have a problem right now. We want to get ahead of the curve.”
With the largest local police department in Virginia, Fairfax County employs more than 1,350 officers. Roessler said new hires will draw a salary of $44,443, which was increased 4.25 percent over last year’s beginning pay rate. He said the department plans to bring in all the new positions, most of whom will be officers, by the end of the upcoming fiscal year.
The recruitment push is a good starting point, said Fairfax Coalition of Police President Marshall Thielen, “but it gets us nowhere near the staffing levels we need to be at for the safety of our officers and citizens.”
He said the county’s low ratio of police to residents often leaves some neighborhoods without an officer available to respond to them.
“It’s a hazard to the officers; it’s a hazard to the citizens,” he said.
