By Jody Callahan
The Commercial Appeal
Forgive the men and women of the Memphis Police Department if they’re teetering between harried and frazzled right now.
Between now and Monday evening, those officers will be charged with keeping the city safe during a rare confluence of events that includes record flooding on the Mississippi River, a pivotal NBA playoff game, thousands of barbecue lovers on Tiger Lane as well as a presidential visit. It’s likely to be one of the busiest weekends the city has seen in years.
And on top of that, many of those officers haven’t had a break in more than a week, since MPD has upgraded its state of readiness to Level 3 - which means all regular days off are canceled - because of area flooding.
Still, MPD officials insist their force is ready for the challenge.
“We’ve had big weekends in Memphis before,” said Toney Armstrong, newly installed as MPD director. “The flood puts a wrinkle in there, brings its own set of challenges. But we’ve had big events in the past, so this is not new to us.”
MPD will be using a variety of units to handle all the events, including DUI, TACT, traffic, reserves and the regular uniform patrol, spokeswoman Karen Rudolph said.
“We’ve got an adequate amount of officers to cover the (events),” she said. “This happens all the time. We always have big events in Memphis.”
Although MPD went to its Level 3 state of readiness on May 6, officers with previously planned leave are still being allowed that time off.
Level 3 is just below Level 4, a designation that means all officers must work 12-hour shifts while vacation and off days are canceled. Armstrong believes the last time a Level 4 state was invoked was during 2003’s “Hurricane Elvis” barrage by straight-line winds.
"(Level 3) is not common. It’s not something that we do all the time. It takes a major event for that to happen,” he said. “You’re talking something that’s of huge magnitude that would take us to a Level 4.”
Still, the move to Level 3 is proving to be costly. So far, the overtime costs for MPD officers working the flooding stands at about $150,000, city officials said.
After this weekend’s duties, Armstrong expects that cost to rise to about $200,000, but he hopes to recover some of that expense from the federal government. Overall, city officials estimated their direct costs from the flooding and severe weather that began April 4 at a little more than $16.4 million, with the bulk of that coming from the Public Works Division.
With the floodwaters receding and both the Grizzlies and the barbecue contest wrapping up, MPD may move back to its normal level of readiness as early as Sunday, Rudolph said.
George Little, the city’s chief administrative officer, praised the job MPD has done so far in handling the severe weather.
“Bottom line is, staff has been called to step up. and they have,” he said. “We haven’t seen any spike in incidents, in all of this, either fire or police incidents. We haven’t had any kind of specific uptick.”
Copyright 2011 The Commercial Appeal, Inc.