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Date: 5/18/2021
NORTHAMPTON – With a calls from some members of the community to cut the Northampton Police Department’s budget by 50 percent, Police Chief Jodi Kasper said the cut would be devastating to the department.
If the cut is passed, Kasper said the department would be cutting 40 of the 67 positions in the department.
“A 50 percent budget cut would result in us laying off 36 full-time officers and four members of our professional staff, and we have a department of 60 officers and seven professional staff,” she said.
After accounting for administration and the detective bureau, the department would have at most six or seven officers on duty on any given day.
“It would be incredibly challenging to be a police officer in the city of Northampton after a 50 percent cut, we would not have enough officers to cover 24 hour a day policing. That would only leave us with just 10 officers to serve the city in a day and that is only if we are fully staffed, so you are realistically looking at six or seven officers tasked with covering the city for 24 hours, but that is impossible,” she said.
With just six or seven officers working on a normal day, Kasper said only three would likely work during the day with none working overnight.
“We would be looking at a modified model where we would likely have no responsive staffing on the overnight shift, and we would probably only have three on days and maybe three on 3 to 11 p.m., she said.
Kasper added that one of her concerns is the fact that people and organizations calling for the cut have not reached out to the department.
“With all the people who have called out in support of a 50 percent cut, including members of the Arts Council, not one person has reached out to me or our department to ask what that would look like and how it would affect our community members,” she said.
By cutting the number of officers on duty, Kasper said it would be impossible for the department to answer all the calls it receives.
“Community members would be looking at delayed responses to all calls, there would be some calls we would not be able to get to at all, we would have unsolved cases in the detective bureau, we would have high employee turnover, we would be relying on mutual aid, there would huge impacts on applications, we would lose most of the diversity in the department, and there would be huge increases to liability for the city,” she said. “There are so many negative outcomes of this proposal.”
Kasper said the department is already short-staffed, especially for overnight shifts, before even accounting for another cut to the budget.
“We were never overstaffed even before we were defunded and we are certainly not overstaffed now, with 60 people on we have already had to drop our shift minimums to numbers I never thought I would see. Currently on our overnight shift we have a minimum of three officers. That is for a city of 30,000 people and we are a busy community,” she said. “I have been here for 24 years and I have never seen anything like this with the small amount of staff we have to do this complex and complicated job.”
Before coming to any conclusion about the budget cut, Kasper said residents need to do their research to understand what that cut would look like.
“I think any significant decisions like this should be well-researched and well-understood. That is my message to anyone that is wondering if this might be a good idea for the city, make sure you understand the outcomes of that,” she said.