Volunteers: With budgets tight, metropolitan Baltimore area law enforcement agencies have found that experienced helpers can ease burdens.
By Julie Bykowicz, The Baltimore Sun
Bert Rice is stationed at Tipton Airfield, where he receives instructions from the Anne Arundel County Police Department for his next crime-fighting helicopter mission.
On this cloudless day, the former Army helicopter pilot and Vietnam veteran goes through his meticulous preflight routine, a visual inspection of the 1970s-era police aircraft. Although he has clocked in more than 125 hours this spring, he won’t be paid for any of it; he’s a volunteer.
As local governments struggle with budget problems, police departments throughout the Baltimore area are relying on highly trained volunteers such as Rice to perform critical tasks.
Ex-government employees scrutinize crime data in Howard County, looking for trends. In Baltimore County, volunteers serve as information technology specialists. And an unpaid forensic scientist in Anne Arundel helps break long-unsolved cases.
“You can’t fill the place of a uniformed police officer with a volunteer, but some of the services provided by the department would not be available without volunteers,” says Cpl. Joe Hatcher, who coordinates Anne Arundel’s 65 non-uniform volunteers.
Between volunteer and auxiliary programs, county governments in the Baltimore area save between $1 million and $2 million a year, police departments estimate. And the nearly 500 volunteers in those programs help return uniformed officers to street patrols, making the free labor more acceptable to public employee unions.
“We’ll take it,” says O’Brien Atkinson, president of the Anne Arundel County Fraternal Order of Police. In better economic times, unions might be wary of the unpaid labor, he said, but for now, the volunteers are welcome.
With Fort Meade, the National Security Agency and Washington within driving distance, the Baltimore area is poised to make use of thousands of retired government and military workers.
Nearly 200 volunteers saved the Baltimore County Police Department about 22,300 hours last year by doing everything from working with children to working with technology, says police spokesman Bill Toohey. Some of the most skilled volunteers do quality-control checks of police incident reports and rebuild computer hardware and networking systems, he said.
“I’m always surprised to learn the different things our volunteers do,” Toohey says. “Some bring considerable training and talent.”
The Baltimore Police Department does not have a centralized volunteer program, according to its personnel division, and the volunteers tend to have less formal backgrounds than they do in the counties.
But in Howard County, more than half of the 40 volunteers are retired government workers, says Capt. Lee Lachman, who oversees volunteer programs for the Howard County Police Department. A corps of seven former NSA managers sifts through crime data, plotting and predicting crime trends.
Jim Blimmel, 68, has been analyzing crime trends there for eight years and says he never tires of the tedious number-crunching.
“They really trust us and treat us well,” he says of the uniformed officers. Then he added: “We’re doing some good stuff now. Some of it is ... you know, maybe I shouldn’t say.”
Volunteers such as Blimmel - no stranger to confidentiality - are perfect for police work, Lachman says.
“They’re already aware of sensitive government work,” he says of the NSA volunteers. “And we know they can certainly pass a background check.”
In addition to tapping local retirees, police departments sometimes make use of recent college graduates who are trying out a career in police work and criminal justice workers who are between jobs.
A trained forensic scientist, Tina Perruzzi, 44, approached Anne Arundel County about volunteering in December 2000. She soon found her niche: poring over unsolved homicide cases.
She hadn’t worked with a police department in 16 years when a friend suggested that she volunteer with the Anne Arundel police.
Perruzzi’s demeanor - she discloses little personal information, and she looks to her supervisor for permission to discuss details of a case - fits well with that of the department’s paid homicide detectives.
As a volunteer, she spends hours each week in a tiny basement room at a police station in Crownsville. The boxes that line the walls hold clues to about 20 unsolved murders, some as many as three decades old.
She shuffles through seemingly endless paperwork trying to piece together information about witnesses and evidence for each case. When she has updated a file as much as she can, she turns it over to Detective Rick Robinson, the county’s only full-time cold-case investigator. He takes it from there.
Although she has since become a paid evidence technician for the Prince George’s County Police Department, Perruzzi says she won’t quit her volunteer work until she has “closed every open homicide in Anne Arundel County.”
Rice, the helicopter pilot, is similarly committed to the department. He recently passed his annual physical and said he wants to keep flying as long as possible. Even at a “young 66,” Rice still looks like a military man. He keeps his gray hair in a buzz cut and wears his dog tags whenever he flies the helicopter.
On a recent afternoon, after making his visual pre-takeoff checks of the helicopter, Rice secures his helmet, gives the aircraft a pat and straps himself into the pilot’s seat on the right side.
His mission that day: to patrol the skies of Anne Arundel County, checking on the security of what he describes only as “sensitive locations.” He makes this flight alone, but a uniformed officer flies along when searching for a criminal suspect or missing person.
“I love this,” he says, his hands on his hips, his gaze fixed on a beloved helicopter. He has put in about 1,500 hours since he began volunteering in 1998.
The smile on Rice’s face when he’s near the helicopter is evidence that the former county councilman doesn’t think twice about not being paid.