By Sean Philip Cotter
Boston Herald
BOSTON — The Boston Police Department is putting out a call for cops from other departments to move to the city, according to a letter sent to the state chiefs of police association, with BPD citing “dire” staffing levels.
“I regret that we have to take this step, but the Boston Police Department is in a dire position,” BPD Commissioner Michael Cox wrote in a letter to the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association. “Although we have made every effort to increase our ranks, retirements continue to have significant impacts on the day to day operations of the Department. I hope to be able to enhance our recruiting efforts by calling for lateral transfers in an effort to add to our ranks and have resources in place before the summer months.”
The Boston Police Department didn’t respond immediately to a Herald request about the letter, instead posting a press release about it a few hours later on Thursday calling for lateral transfers.
The Dec. 27 letter, obtained by the Herald, to Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association Executive Director Mark Leahy, the retired Northborough top cop, asks him to disseminate the correspondence to other chiefs as something of a courtesy as BPD gets ready to call for “lateral transfers,” which is the formal process by which a police officer in Massachusetts moved from one department to another.
“I hope that Chiefs can be supportive of Officers wishing to change path and continue their service in law enforcement,” Cox wrote in this new letter to Leahy, who declined to comment for this article. “Our intent is to not have a significant impact on any one agency and we would take into consideration the needs of the Department and the Chief’s input, that has an Officer expressing interest in a lateral opportunity.”
The department, police unions and some Boston politicians have said BPD is underfunded by hundreds of officers, citing ongoing retirements as officers hit the mandatory retirement age as well as the difficulty recruiting new members in an era with more anti-cop rhetoric and sentiment. Mayor Michelle Wu’s budget funds an extra academy class this year in an effort to staff up.
This type of move has been in the offing for some time. As the Herald reported in December, the city took a big step toward encouraging such transfers by waiving Boston’s residency requirement for the first six months of a new cop’s tenure here. The stated goal was to make it logistically easier for cops to transfer from other departments that have their own residency requirements.
Then there was the Live Boston 617 report a few days later that there was a draft of a recruiting flier aimed at cops from other departments, though at the time the department told the organization that BPD had not made any changes like that.
City Councilor Michael Flaherty, the public-safety chair, said he plans on calling for a hearing about the data and whether expanding other recruitment options like raising the minimum and maximum ages would be better moves.
“I’m not convinced that poaching experienced officers from neighboring communities is going to solve the problem,” Flaherty said.
Boston has only put out a call like this once before. Back in 2007, new commissioner Ed Davis, himself a transfer of sorts from Lowell, said the BPD had worked its way through the civil-service hiring list and was looking for 100 more cops to add by the summer.
“I thought it was very successful,” Davis told the Herald this week. “We got some very high-quality people. It’s healthy for organizations to inject new blood.”
Former Boston Police Superintendent-in-Chief Dan Linskey, now a managing partner of security risk management at Kroll, was a driving force behind the decision to make this move then — and he said he thinks it’s a good idea, though potentially more difficult, now.
“The challenge will be it only works if the department they’re coming from is willing to let them go,” Linskey said, noting that at that point many departments were still well staffed, unlike now, when many organizations are facing many of the same issues as Boston is.
Linskey said they got 44 new cops from other departments and more than 60 from merging the city’s old municipal police into BPD — all people who could just do a quick two-month abridged academy class, rather than the normal six months before hitting the streets.
He added that the lateral-transfer process only goes through if the other department is willing to part with the cop. Linskey, as Cox did in the letter, said he hopes other departments will do right by officers looking for new opportunities. He said that back in 2007, when other departments were more amenable, they didn’t get a lot of pushback, but some organizations did cut Boston off after taking a couple of officers, and others only parted with cops if they get a transfer of their own from somewhere else.
“You have to temper expectations,” said Davis, now a private consultant who worked on the task force that recommended Cox’s hiring last year. “What they want and what they’re going to get are two different things. It’s not going to cure all the staffing issues of Boston. But it’s definitely worth it.”
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