By Dana Rieck
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — The police department’s leadership here is considering moving officers from eight-hour shifts to 11-hour shifts in hopes of alleviating staffing woes and ramping up patrols.
The discussions come as the department grapples with its lowest staffing levels on record. While the agency is budgeted for more than 1,200 officers, it had just 883 as of this week, said Sgt. Charles Wall. That number marks a decrease of 29 from December.
“It’s been in the media we are understaffed,” Wall said in a news briefing Wednesday. “And so any schedule change that may allow for longer shifts that may provide additional coverage are certainly things we will look at.”
Officials with the St. Louis Police Officers Association declined to comment because discussions are still in early stages.
The move to longer shifts can allow departments to put more officers on the streets during peak times and alleviate staffing shortages. One study by the Policing Institute found that 10-12-hour shifts reduce the number of overtime hours logged by officers.
And longer shifts are also popular among officers, which could help the department recruit and retain new hires, according to the Department of Justice. Officers working 10-hour shifts are often associated with higher quality work, and they get more sleep than their eight-hour colleagues.
But the change would take quite some time to implement if the department decides to pursue it. Wall noted that any change would likely require involvement from the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and a change in the department’s pay ordinance, including what qualifies as overtime pay.
The change has already been installed by some departments locally and across Missouri to alleviate staffing woes and reduce crime.
In St. Louis County, officers began working 12-hour shifts in late 2022 and early 2023. Previous shifts were 10 hours, and the longer shifts were an effort to staff more officers during peak crime hours, from about 1 to 8 p.m. And in Kansas City, where the police department has hundreds of vacancies, police in January switched to 11-hour shifts for all patrol division officers.
In addition to easing shortages and beefing up patrols during peak hours, Kansas City police Chief Stacey Graves said in January the 11-hour shifts would also improve response times. The agency employs about 1,100 officers, according to local media outlets.
St. Louis and Kansas City aren’t alone: Police departments across the U.S. have struggled to fill officer vacancies, beginning largely with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the Police Executive Research Forum. The nonprofit surveyed almost 200 police departments and found that hiring was down 5% in 2020, while resignations increased by 18% and retirements increased by 45% from the previous year.
The city’s police staffing, which sits at a 28% vacancy rate, has strained the rank-and-file as they try to cover three patrol shifts in St. Louis’ six districts. In September, only two police officers were initially assigned to a district just south of downtown, when they both called in sick, leaving the department scrambling.
Some neighborhoods, including downtown, have used outside sources to staff police officers to combat high crime levels. They’ll pay city cops to work overtime or contract with private security companies that hire off-duty officers but are not subject to the same oversight as the police department.
Last summer, St. Louis police Chief Robert Tracy also tapped a nonprofit that supports local police to fund extra patrols downtown, an area of the city that has long been at the center of scrutiny over policing and public safety.
The St. Louis Police Foundation, a nonprofit funded by a group of wealthy St. Louis residents, has committed $1.5 million to pay officers $70 an hour — about $15 to $25 more per hour than officers’ typical overtime pay — to work secondary shifts. The police department has invoiced the organization for just under $800,000 for patrols in July through December, according to records obtained through a Sunshine request.
The foundation also funds more than a third of Tracy’s $275,000 annual compensation.
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