The Athens Police Department is facing a severe staffing shortage, which is causing officers to put in excessive overtime.
APD has only 19 full-time sworn officers who are required to work a standard 40-hour workweek, said APD Chief Richard Mayer, while similar-sized cities Portsmouth and Chillicothe both have more than 40 officers.
It's not enough
Mayer said. We're down to levels we had back in the early 1980s. Part of it is the difficulty in filling the vacancies that have come up and part is budget issues. We're not keeping pace with filling the slots when officers leave.
The department is supposed to have 21 full-time sworn officers, but one officer is serving in the U.S. National Guard and another officer is on injured leave, Mayer said.
The shortage has forced APD officers to put in hundreds of hours of overtime, Mayer said.
(The officers) put in 172 hours of overtime in the last two weeks he said. Two weeks before that
it was 197 and a half
and before that
it was 268 hours.
When compared with other cities in Ohio with populations similar to Athens, APD has the fewest number of full-time officers.
Portsmouth has 41 full-time sworn officers, said Jackie Ramey, an administrative assistant for the Portsmouth Police Department.
Likewise, Chillicothe has 43 full-time sworn police officers, said Emma Moore, the records clerk for the Chillicothe Chief of Police.
While the number of full-time officers in Chillicothe is double that of the APD, Moore said the Chillicothe Police Department actually has lost 13 officers since she started working for the department seven years ago.
Athens, Portsmouth and Chillicothe have populations of about 21,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau data for 2000.
Ohio University students living on-campus, who are not included in the census data, add about 7,200 people to the Athens total, according to the OU Office of Institutional Research. That brings the total number of residents in Athens to more than 28,000 for nine months out of the year.
Mayer said the addition of so many students to the general population puts added strain on the already-stretched police department, especially during weekends like homecoming and Halloween.
One might call it a crisis
but it's definitely a crunch
Mayer said.
OU students who live on campus also are serviced by the Ohio University Police Department. While OUPD occasionally does provide assistance to APD, OUPD officers operate largely on campus and its periphery, Mayer said.
They (OUPD officers) do not routinely patrol the city of Athens
Mayer said. The increase in students living in the city really straps our department for resources.
OUPD officers are sworn in as reserve officers for APD because of a contract agreement between the city and the university, Mayer said. That means that OUPD officers have full jurisdiction within Athens city limits, but Mayer said that OUPD officers usually only use that power in areas near campus, such as Union Street and the Jefferson Hill area.
OUPD has 16 full-time officers and five full-time lieutenants on its force, said OUPD Chief Tony Camechis. The department also has one officer in the U.S. National Guard.
Camechis said OUPD has increased its patrol in student neighborhoods adjacent to campus as part of the joint-patrol program APD and OUPD set up last year. OUPD officers patrol neighborhoods on a regular basis, but concentrate their efforts on campus, he said.
OUPD is not facing a staffing shortage right now but could use more officers, Camechis said.
A staffing shortage such as the one APD is facing can sometimes affect officers' response times to calls, Mayer said, but that is not a problem for APD now.
The officers are ranking their calls and increasing their communication with the APD dispatcher in order to get to the most urgent calls first, Mayer said. Less urgent calls, such as vandalism or minor theft reports, can be scheduled at a time when an officer would be available to complete the report.
The shortage of APD officers also negatively affect department officers. The increase in overtime hours has decreased morale among the officers, and their stress level has increased, Mayer said.
It puts strain on the budget and on the officers
which is more critical because if they're putting in 20 or more hours of overtime every two weeks
it can be very stressful
