four police officers are there in the lapd.
four police officers are there in the lapd.
how many police officers are there in the lapd?
four
Na
Na
under mayor turner, houston police department has seen a mass exodus of officers, due in large part to ongoing conflict between the mayor's office and the houston police department's pension fund management. in early 2017, changes were made to the police officers pension fund, which resulted in many long-serving officers to lose part of their contributions, which are being funneled back into the aggregate fund in order to bolster the fund's holdings. multiple controversies over this and other issues related to the pension, retirement rank and calculations of pension amounts have resulted in a substantial number of police officers retiring from hpd before the new pension policies went into effect. a substantial number of officers are continuing to retire or resign, causing the number of police officers who are actually and actively working in some capacity as licensed peace officers to be in drastic decline. among those divisions hardest hit includes the patrol divisions. while houston police department spokespersons repeatedly declined to provide solid or specific numbers of patrol officers actively "working the streets," current officers in multiple areas (patrol districts) frequently complain about a lack of manpower, inadequate and slow-to-respond back-up units, and citizens join these officers in reporting increasingly poor response times and inadequate police presence on active scenes. these officers worry about increased safety concerns and fears related to greater danger to the officers because of the lack of manpower, especially during the night shift. sometimes, officers working the overnight shift must contend with only one or two units covering an entire "beat," areas which are subdivisions of districts. it is now routine, for example, for officers covering a beat to have units who are assigned two or three beats away called away from their beats to respond to calls for assistance or extra manpower. this not only impacts response time to a fellow officer who is calling for urgent help, but it then leaves other beats with reduced and often no coverage for their own beats while they are responding to an officer in another beat. these situations are now commonplace in many police districts. a recent estimate given by a high-ranking supervisor for hpd was that there are approximately 3,500 sworn officers (the total umber of actively employed, licensed peace officers in all divisions and administrative positions) currently serving as houston police officers. by comparison, this is roughly equal to the number of sworn hpd officers employed 25 – 30 years ago. while the mayor's office and newly appointed houston police chief arturo "art" acevedo's (formerly chief of police for austin, texas) office maintain that they are "filling the gaps," at the current rate of attrition (officers leaving hpd via retirement and resignation) compared to the number of new officers graduating from the hpd academy (the "classroom" portion of which lasts approximately six months and the "practical" portion of which lasts another six months), even with multiple classes overlapping (approximately 4 classes of 50 cadets each) it will take more than a decade, using the most "optimistic" projections, just to return the houston police department to the often-promoted number of 5,000 police officers. when one is reminded of that other often-quoted statistic that houston is the "fastest growing city in the nation" (actually, recent reports from the us census bureau show houston dropping to number two last year, thanks in large part to the current oil bust) and that as the fourth largest city in the united states (provided that houston has not already overtaken chicago's population, which by some estimates it has), simply bringing houston's police force back to 5,000 officers after 10 more years of substantial growth (houston added an estimated 85,000+ individuals during 2016), houston could potentially add 1 to 1.5 million people during the next decade of growth. by comparison, the chicago police department has approximately 12,000+ sworn officers. these numbers are similar on both their wikipedia page as well as the chicago police department's website. so in comparison between these two cities with virtually identical populations, chicago has four times the number of police officers and shows a negative growth trend (their population is declining over the last several years) while houston, with 3,000 sworn officers, has the number two growth trend of any city in the nation.
houston police department