Menino to double police recruits

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino plans to double the size of this spring's police class to 70, making it the largest class in seven years. With plans to add two more groups next year, he said, the Boston Police Department will gradually return to staffing levels of the 1990s.

Menino has come under fire recently from neighborhood leaders and City Council President Michael F. Flaherty, who have said the mayor should hire hundreds of police to restore the force to late-1990s levels and to help quell the recent rise in crime. Menino said Friday that the addition of 35 to the recruit class is not a response to those calls but an effort to bring down the cost of police overtime, which has soared in recent years.

According to city figures, the department has already overspent its entire $21.5 million overtime budget for fiscal year 2006, which ends June 30. With more than three months remaining in the fiscal year, the police department has paid officers $24.8 million for overtime. The department ended last year with a $9.7 million deficit, after overspending its $20 million overtime budget by nearly $10 million.

''We know that a lot of our officers have been tested and worked a lot of overtime," said Menino. ''We're trying to reduce the amount we spend on overtime and find a better way to put together patrols in the city."

City officials said they don't know exactly what the net increase in the patrol force will be after the new recruits graduate because they're not sure how many current officers will retire or quit. But they say they're hoping that by next January there will be 2,100 uniformed personnel in the department.

That is still far fewer than the 2,245 police who were in uniform in January of 1999, but more than the 2,067 on the force as of this January. Of those, 1,453 were patrolmen.

Menino said he is adding new police officers ''in a way that's affordable and sustainable. People want 300 more officers, but there's only one person who has to pay for it -- the mayor of the city of Boston -- and I can't spend money I don't have."

Adding police won't necessarily solve the city's crime woes, he said.

''I don't know what reduces crime. Nobody has a real answer. Community policing helps. Summer jobs work. Taking handguns off the street reduces crime. It's not only having police officers on the street, but it's helpful. People feel safe with police on the streets."

The Rev. Bruce Wall, an anticrime activist, praised city leaders for putting more police on the force, but said he is more concerned about who is being hired than how many new officers there are.

''Every Friday night when I walk the neighborhoods I see the police pulling over a number of young people, stopping, frisking, inquiring, checking on weapons," he said. ''I like to see police in the neighborhoods. But unfortunately all of the kids they're stopping look like me, and all the police officers who are stopping them do not look like me. A number of these officers do not know how to talk with them or deal with them.

''More officers are great, but if they look like Aryan Nation, you're going to turn the good kids into bad kids, and you'll have a big problem this summer," he said.

According to Commissioner Kathleen O'Toole, who met with Wall last week, the next recruit class will be 58 percent minority and 21 percent women. She said that despite the federal court order throwing out the department's affirmative action plan, city officials have been able to hire minorities by requesting from the state Civil Service Commission applicants fluent in certain languages like Haitian-Creole and Cape Verdean Spanish.

''We tried to diversify the class to be more reflective of some of the newer populations in the city," said O'Toole.

O'Toole said she is trying to better manage the department's overtime, which is largely driven by police union contracts. Court time, fill-ins for sick or injured officers, and negotiated pay raises account for much of the increase in overtime costs, she said.

In addition, the city has used overtime to pay for recent ''high-visibility deployments" in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Under Operation Home Safe, officers on motorcycles, bicycles, and horses descend on a neighborhood, rounding up people with outstanding warrants and seizing weapons.

''This has been a significant cost to us. But you can't put a price on safety," said O'Toole, asserting that the city has historically underfunded the overtime budget. ''They don't give us a realistic number."

Samuel Tyler, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, said the department must rein in overtime or face recurring budget deficits.

''There have been times when the department has been more careful about managing overtime," he said. ''At some point it makes sense to add more officers to reduce overtime. But that is only part of the answer. It has to come with better management of the overtime."