The Newburgh Heights Police Department will soon be down to five patrol officers — a staffing level Chief John Majoy described to Village Council as a “catastrophic low” — as the Cuyahoga County village struggles to attract candidates and leans on overtime to keep two officers on each shift, cleveland.com reported.
Majoy told council that one officer submitted a two-week notice that day, meaning the department drops from six patrol officers to five on Nov. 17, cleveland.com reported. The department also has three sergeants, one of whom is on medical leave until at least Jan. 1, and Majoy said staffing is at its lowest level in his 13 years as chief.
“To put it candidly, we are at a catastrophic low,” Majoy told council, according to cleveland.com. “We have no candidates in the pool. We have no applications pending. We have no one going through the background investigation. We’re at a really bad impasse.”
The pipeline numbers behind that warning are stark. The department rejected 27 candidates this year over background issues and five more who were not certified, while another 25 people picked up applications and never returned them, Majoy told council, according to cleveland.com. He pointed to pay as a central problem: starting pay under the village’s contract is $23.50 an hour, while the next-closest police job he found advertised started at about $30 an hour.
Overtime is filling the gap, at a rising cost to the officers themselves. Police logged 152 overtime hours in September and 252 in October, and the department projects 272 hours will be needed in November and 296 in December just to hold the two-officer minimum, cleveland.com reported. Majoy said officers have stopped submitting some time-off requests because they know the department is short, and he warned council the village could lose another officer who is in the process with a different agency.
Majoy himself has been returning to patrol to help — as often as three days a week in July and August — and council unanimously approved paying him time-and-a-half for hours beyond 40 spent covering shifts, a step he described as temporary while he and the mayor work on a longer-term fix, cleveland.com reported. With contract negotiations approaching, he told council he did not think separate action on wages was appropriate now, but that the village will have to make changes to attract officers.
What happens next: despite the shortage, Majoy told residents the department will keep two officers on duty around the clock and does not expect response times to change, cleveland.com reported. The Nov. 17 drop to five patrol officers is the immediate milestone, and the village’s upcoming contract talks are where the pay question — the issue the chief tied directly to the empty applicant pool — will be decided.
Photo: Raymond Wambsgans, CC BY-SA