HPD says officer
shortage is overA deputy chief warns that
vacancies could resume if funding
for 25 recruits is rejected
Honolulu Police Department officials have declared that the officer shortage of the past decade is over.
"By the end of this year, beginning of next year, we may have more recruits in training than we have vacancies," Deputy Chief Glen Kajiyama told the City Council's Budget Committee. "We have never been confronted with that before. In other words, we will have finally caught up."
But police officials warned the Council that if a request to fund 25 more police recruit positions is not approved, that could lead to vacancies going back up again.
"If we are not allowed these 25 positions, I personally think we're going to fall back again, and we're going to go back to '94, '95 levels where we were at ... 400 vacancies," Kajiyama said.
The department has been trying to get back to full staffing since 1994 when an early retirement option led to 147 veteran officers leaving the force.
Kajiyama said the department currently has 157 officers who could retire at any time.
Because of the six- to eight-month lag time it takes to get a recruit class organized, the officer shortage could hit again.
"We could lose another 157 people right off the bat, and that's the equivalent of one whole year of recruit class," he said.
Mayor Jeremy Harris' administration did not put the funding for the recruit positions in the next year's proposed budget sent to the City Council.
The Police Department went before the committee yesterday to ask that the Council put in $225,000 to fund the positions for the last three months of the next fiscal year because it would like to start a recruit class of up to 40 in May 2005. Currently, the department has 167 recruits in different stages of training. If they become officers, the department will have only 85 vacancies.
On April 1 a new recruit class of 66 will begin, and an additional 45 recruits are scheduled to start class Jan. 4.
The additional recruit positions are part of a larger $4.1 million salary request by police to the Council which also includes some overtime and holiday pay that was also not included in the budget by the city administration.
City Budget Director Ivan Lui-Kwan told the committee that the Police Department already has the funding to train recruits to fill 252 vacancies.
Maj. Susan Ballard said, however, that the money Lui-Kwan is referring to is already spoken for, with the recruit classes already planned.
"They'd prefer us to be reactive. That means we would take a while to fill positions, therefore they save money," Kajiyama said. "We prefer to stay proactive, constantly filling positions."
