The Montgomery County Department of Police has the highest vacancy rate of sworn officers in 10 years, according to a memorandum presented Monday by the County Council’s Public Safety Committee.
“We are running out of time to right this sinking ship,” Lee Holland, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 35, the county’s police union, said Monday in his written response to the memorandum.
The vacancy rate for sworn staff in the department was 0.9% in 2015 with 11 vacancies and is 14% in 2024 with 179 vacancies–and it has steadily risen since 2019, according to the memo by legislative analyst Susan Farag.
Farag wrote in the memo that the county is not alone in facing a staffing shortage, noting larger factors are at play.
“The police staffing shortage is not new, it is national, and it persists,” Farag wrote. “Departments struggle to adapt as they experience high numbers of retirements and resignations, and many younger members of the workforce are not choosing policing as a profession.”
County Council Public Safety Committee Chair Sidney Katz (D-Dist. 3) acknowledged the national trend but said it shouldn’t affect how the county addresses the problem.
“I’ve heard people say that it’s a national concern, and it is, but if we can’t solve it nationally, we have to figure out how to solve it locally, and that’s what we’re working on,” Katz said.
Specifically, the staffing shortage in the county police department impacts the patrol services bureau in numerous ways. Having fewer patrol officers increases how long it takes for police to respond to incidents, according to the memo.
“Patrol is the backbone of the police department,” county Police Chief Marcus Jones said in the Monday meeting. “This is the priority for us: to make sure that these officers have the necessary staffing to be able to respond to these calls and get to them in a timely manner.”
From 2019 to 2023, priority response times increased by 54 seconds to over six minutes and routine response times increased by 57 seconds to over 13 minutes. The largest spikes in response times occurred in the Rockville and Germantown patrol districts.
Rockville’s “typical staffing strength” is the worst in the county, with 76 officers, when the district should have 106 officers, the memo said. Rockville City has its own police department, which was not included in the memo.
The Germantown district’s staffing strength is low too, with 105 officers employed out of 137 spots, according to the memo.
“Response times are linked to case closure rates, and generally, the sooner police can get to the scene, the more likely they are to solve the crime,” the memo said.
Also, the shortage of patrol officers leads to increases in overtime use. In 2022, the patrol districts in the county worked 79,554 hours of overtime, and 122,549 hours in 2023–a 54% increase. Overtime usage increased the most in the Germantown district.
“While some overtime is necessary in any 24/7 public safety operation, too much reliance on overtime is associated with poorer outcomes,” the memo said, “A growing body of research demonstrates associations between overtime high and uses of force, more community complaints, and increased implicit bias.”
Other areas of law enforcement are significantly impacted by shortages as well, including the 911 Emergency Communication Center (ECC). It has 64 vacant positions, which is a 43% vacancy rate.
“Call takers and dispatchers … are in short supply,” the memo said. “The ECC has adapted by combining call channels for dispatch, but the short staffing impacts all aspects of operations, including training and quality control.”
The county has implemented numerous measures to try to mitigate staffing shortages, including contracting with a law enforcement-focused recruitment agency, according to the memo.
The county has also increased salaries and started providing a $20,000 signing bonus in February 2023. The memo indicated that these steps are necessary for the county to be able to compete with local police departments, such as Rockville and Gaithersburg, as well as neighboring jurisdictions, such as Howard and Prince George’s counties and Washington, D.C.
In his statement Monday, Holland said he is frustrated that “the number of newly hired officers continues to be stagnant” and that the salary increase and signing bonus are not effective.
A recent internal survey of union members who are eligible to receive the $20,000 starting bonus showed that “the starting bonus was not a major factor in the decision to join” the department, Holland said.
He said one way to increase the number of officers would be to promote law enforcement as a career path to students and to use school resource officers, known as SROs, to “provide the instruction and guidance for our younger generation.”
At the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, the county removed police officers from inside schools and replaced SROs with community engagement officers who are stationed off of school grounds but are assigned to respond to calls at nearby schools.
Holland also said county police officers need to have a higher wage and benefit package that is “commensurate with the risk and increased demands of the job.”
“Through collective bargaining, we will continue to advocate the best method(s) to attract and retain the most professional and well-trained law enforcement officers,” he said.
Holland also mentioned the importance of improving morale in retaining and recruiting officers and Jones emphasized that this should be part of the plan to mitigate staffing shortages.
“It is important that the morale be supported for these officers that are doing a job that’s very dangerous. They’re going above and beyond,” Jones said. “It’s going to be very important in order to keep this train on the tracks, that that is a part of this strategy.”