Missouri’s St. Louis Police Department reportedly lost over 17 police officers in a month and has only 912 positions filled out of a city budget set for 1,224 officers.
It’s the lowest point in the police department’s staffing history, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday. (RELATED: Blue City Tried To ‘Cure’ Violence Through Community ‘Interrupters.’ It Didn’t Go As Planned)
St. Louis police ranks hit a new low after years of departures https://t.co/tin8nJgn1y
— PD Crime Beat (@STLCrimeBeat) December 11, 2023
“I’ve never heard of anything that low,” Joe Steiger, business manager of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, told the outlet. “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,” Steiger added.
Just a few officers being out of commission can create major headaches for the department, according to the report. In September, the department had to scramble to find replacements when two officers called in sick, the outlet reported.
Steiger referred to the incident when he told the outlet that it could take just two or three officers not showing up to work for major problems to develop.
“They’re [districts] so much bigger now, to have two or three people covering them, it’s just not enough,” Steiger told the outlet.
The lack of manpower comes with its costs to public safety and the department is in “crisis” mode, the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association told Fox 2 back in July after a scandal broke out over police allegedly taking at least 45 minutes to show up to a crash site.
Nick Dunne, a spokesman for the city’s mayor, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the mayor “remains steadfast in its efforts to recruit and retain employees across departments.” The same outlet noted that despite the decrease in manpower, crime is on the decline in the city and that “[p]olice staffing levels and crime rates are not always cause-and-effect.”
The city suffers from one of the worst murder per capita rates in the entire country, The Associated Press noted back in January 2022.
The mayor once criticized the city for spending too much on policing, but has since increased the police’s budget, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.