By Chris Libonati
syracuse.com
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — A years long fight over how many police officers the Syracuse Police Department needs will likely culminate this year with a study that answers the question.
The Common Council will vote Monday on a budget that would allow for up to $300,000 to be spent on a study to determine how many police officers the department needs, Councilor Michael Greene said. The study would also look at how those officers are being used.
The money will be directed to Auditor Nader Maroun, who would contract with a consulting agency that will do the study. The expenditure was not included in Mayor Ben Walsh’s proposed budget. If approved, the council would be adding it.
Greene, who pitched the idea, believes there are enough supporting councilors to pass the amendment.
He said the department’s public frustration with how many officers it has, the union’s “Syracuse Needs Police” campaign and the size of the department contributed to the proposal. At $56 million, the department has the biggest budget of any city department.
“We have to make sure those dollars are being spent well,” Greene said.
Syracuse Police Chief Joseph Cecile said an outside consultant studying staffing would be a first in his time at the department. Only the department has ever reviewed its staffing, said Cecile, a 37-year veteran said.
The department currently has about 385 officers, according to Officer Joe Moran, president of the Syracuse Police Benevolent Association. In 1996, the department had 502 officers, according to data provided by the department.
Call volume has dropped in that span. Since 2001, the department has received about 31 percent fewer calls, according to numbers publicly available in the department’s annual reports.
To make sure the study gets done by a neutral group, lawmakers took the study out of the council’s and the department’s hands, according to Greene.
Cecile, appointed chief less than a month ago, said the department would follow the recommendations made by the report as long as they mesh with the terms of the city’s contract with the officers’ union.
“We would welcome a study like this to show us whether or not we have the number of officers we need and whether they’re deployed the right way,” Cecile said.
Cecile said he hopes the study takes into account the current workload for the department. In the last 20 years, the department has not shed some of the duties police agencies in other cities have dropped, Cecile said. Syracuse police officers still respond to minor car crashes, noise complaints and other low-priority incidents.
Last year, Moran, the union president, began a Syracuse Needs Police campaign, arguing the city needs more cops. The union has long claimed the department is short on officers.
While the study may develop staffing recommendations for the department, the union contract may be the biggest barrier to change. It determines the work schedule for all officers.
The department’s schedule has been a target of negotiations between the city and the union, according to Moran. The current union contract expires in December, meaning a study delivered in the next year could be used in future negotiations.
©2022 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit syracuse.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.