Baltimore?s mayoral rivals traded proposals for beefing up the city?s police force Thursday.
Calling for 250 more police officers and a 15 percent raise across the board for current city officers, mayoral candidate Keiffer Mitchell stood on the corner of Calverton and Baltimore streets, the scene of one of the city?s 167 homicides this year.
?We?re in a crisis. It?s no longer acceptable for Baltimore to be the image of violence around the country,” said Mitchell, a city councilman.
Mitchell, D. District 11, promised to use the additional police to close out open cases.
“There are 40,000 open warrants in Baltimore City, so when I take office, I will double the warrant apprehension task force,” he said.
Money for the additional staff, more than $38 million, could be raised without increasing taxes, Mitchell said.
“We [could] reduce overtime costs, use homeland security grants and freeze mayoral staff hiring,” Mitchell said.
But Mayor Sheila Dixon said Mitchell?s proposal was financially unsound and offered her own plan.
“His number is unrealistic,” Dixon said later at a news conference outlining her six-point, $2.1 million plan to increase police recruiting.
“We want to increase our recruiting goals from 240 officers to 300 this year,” she said.
Dixon?s plan included studying the effectiveness of city marketing efforts to attract new recruits, provide assistance to help potential recruits pass the civil service test and a new program to pay the interest on officers? student loans if they sign on for six years.
“We need these additional steps to improve recruiting,” she said.
Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm said potential recruits were having trouble passing the civil service test, as well as a background check.
“Forty percent of the applicants pass the test,” he said at the news conference.
Hamm said the department has 158 vacancies.
But police union spokesman Paul Blair said the city did not have a recruiting problem.
“Over the last two fiscal years, they hired 461 police officers, but we?ve lost 532 officers. We can?t retain officers,” he said, citing several factors to account for officers leaving the city.
“Nobody comes to the Baltimore police for money; [the retention problem is] about working conditions, leadership, equipment and, at the very end, wages,” he said.
Mixed messages on crime-fighting strategies also were a concern, Blair said, citing pressure in the southern district, where officers are being told to make more arrests, he said.
“One week, we?re told to lock everybody up in sight, the next week, they tell us to hug everybody,” he said.
