The Worcester City Council focused on public safety at its Sept. 29 meeting, taking up the city’s police staffing needs and the status of 39 fire hydrants that are currently out of service.
While discussing upcoming police retirements and the idea of having two officers per patrol car, Councilor Tony Economou asked Worcester Police Chief Paul Saucier about the department’s current staffing and how many officers are needed.
Saucier said WPD currently has 478 officers. He said there are ways to recruit officers who have left other departments, though Worcester has also lost officers the same way.
“We are proactive,” the chief said. “We go out to job fairs. We put a bunch of material on our website and on Facebook, telling officers that this opportunity is there.”
Councilor Morris Bergman asked about the number of Worcester officers per capita compared with other cities.
“Worcester is lower than similarly-situated cities, like Providence, Springfield, Boston, and others,” Bergman said. “I think there’s a good case to be made, in addition to trying to maintain what we have in terms of the number of officers. We need to actually expand it for the population that continues to grow.”
Saucier said Worcester’s 478 officers put the city below many comparable cities on a per-capita basis. Springfield, with a population of approximately 150,000, has 500 officers, he said, while Hartford, Connecticut, has 413 officers for about 120,000 residents.
“My goal is to get that up to at least 538 officers,” Saucier said. “We could go to a different shift system Where we could go to 4 days on, 2 days off, 10-hour shifts.”
That system would provide 34 officers per shift, Saucier said, but about 10% would be allotted for vacations, while hospital duty and other assignments can take officers off the street. At times, he said, the city could potentially have as few as 12 officers on the street.
“We need to work to expand that,” he said. “We need to work to expand that, and my goal would be to have 55 officers per shift. That’s three shifts during that operation period, and also, we’d be able to add to traffic enforcement.”
Bergman said he hopes the city can budget for more officers and find practical, fiscally responsible ways to increase staffing.
“If we have the motivation and the desire to get this done, I’m confident that in the next few years we could get to where we need to go,” Bergman said.
Saucier said candidates for the department’s next academy class are being vetted. The class can include as many as 43 recruits, who would graduate after a 12-week academy.
The staffing report was referred to the council’s Public Safety Committee.
