Posted on 04/17/2022 2:45:31 PM PDT by Beave Meister
Baltimore, MD – Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced plans to launch a 35-person civilian investigative corps to help Baltimore police detectives solve low-level crimes.
Scott announced the $5 million program as part of a $4 billion proposed spending plan for the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), The Baltimore Sun reported.
Baltimore City Budget Director Bob Cenname said the mayor’s proposal called for eliminating 30 vacant sworn police officer positions and replacing them with civilian investigators.
Cenname said the civilians would help detectives and patrol officers in completing investigations by tracking down leads and searching databases, The Baltimore Sun reported.
The mayor and Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison rolled out the plan to stretch resources, WBAL reported.
“It helps us with speed and it helps us with frequency,” Commissioner Harrison explained. “We can get to cases faster and we can take on more cases at the same time by adding this capacity.”
(Excerpt) Read more at policetribune.com ...
Vote mules. It needed to be said.
If the right people are hired and put on the right cases it might work.
I wouldn’t want Peter Falk having to make an armed response.
No police union, no retirement packages, reduced benefits......yep....seems like a money-saver.....
Now if we could just do it with the TSA agents.
Agreed, but the odds of that happening are very small. These positions are more likely to be political patronage/spoils positions for more people to collect a government check.
Privatize!
Do they get a badge and gun
So.What do they do for bar fights, domestic disputes et, etc, etc?
sub-text, despite all our efforts we could not recruit enough abcdef...xyz's to fill the vacate positions...seems nobody want to be Ballamo cop.
It sounds to me like the civvies will be mostly relegated to desk duty, which is fine. Field work should be a total no-no, even if they have some training. They won’t convey the same authority as police, and they definitely won’t come with harsher punishment if maimed or killed.
Badges?!? We don’t need no stinkin’ ’ badges!
You just have far fewer people willing to be cops. A good friend of mine recently lost the mayoral election in a major American city. He's a Democrat, but old-school type and pro-police. He'd been in city government for awhile, and told me before the election that the police union had told him that if he didn't win, recruitment was going to crater even worse than it had.
It used to be that when the city would advertise for a new police academy class, the line would be more than 1000 people long. Now, they get less than 100, most of whom are excluded for various reasons.
Truth is that most major cities cannot fill their police academy classes, and are running short of cops. And it snowballs, because the fewer cops, the harder policing gets, and the job becomes even less attractive.
are they still prosecuting low level crimes?
Also how uneducated and ignorant will the investigators be?????
Cops are civilians too.
Brilliant. What could go wrong? /s
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