Baltimore City Council President Zeke Cohen was quick at Tuesday night’s budget proposal hearing to say that the Baltimore Police Department is a “different department” today than the one he met as a newly elected councilmember eight years ago.
“This is a department that has improved its efficiency, its effectiveness, that is, frankly, just winning when it comes to the crime fight,” said Cohen, citing the continued historic drop in homicides and non-fatal shootings. In April, the city recorded five homicides, the lowest monthly total since modern record keeping began in the 1970’s.
BPD’s $614M budget proposal for FY 2026 is a 3.5% increase over last fiscal year.
But the council president, who ran on a platform of improving transparency and efficiency at City Hall, took issue with growing overtime and the department’s hundreds of vacancies.
“We can't be passing budgets and then enabling unfettered overtime if the dollars aren't right, we should be honest about it on the front end,” said Cohen.
Cohen pressed to know the number of standing vacancies and expected overtime the city is looking at for the next year.
The number of sworn vacancies is 492.
“I think we will fill these positions within the next three to five years, because right now, by the end of the year, I think we're going to have 100 more cops than we have now,” said Commissioner Richard Worley. He says a better contract is helping recruitment and retaining officers who might otherwise retire. Worley reported that recruitment and applications to the force are growing. He expects around 150 officers to graduate to complete training and begin working patrol this year.
While Cohen said he appreciated the commissioner’s “optimism”, the president was “skeptical” about recruitment given a long history of mistrust between Baltimore’s youth and the department.
The number of overtime hours is expected to dip this year, said Shallah Graham, BPD CFO, down to 898,000 overtime hours (down from 914,000 hours last year).
“If you actually take the hours of our vacancies and put that into overtime, the numbers do correlate,” said Graham.
Worley says the force is only about 80% staffed, a number that dips lower on weekends. That adds to the overtime hours needed, he said.
Increased overtime payouts are due to a number of factors, said the commissioner, like recent salary increases for officers and the fact that officers are entitled to having a certain amount of weekends off-duty. Worley said that on Artscape, which was held over Memorial Day weekend, there were some officers making $1800 a day due to a combination of overtime and contractual obligations.
“And then you get to the downtown deployment, almost every one of those officers you see at the Harbor and at Fells Point and Fed Hill, those are almost all overtime officers,” said the commissioner.
The council must pass a balanced budget by June 26th.
