A Plan That Was Already In the Making
Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson says he wants to put more than 100 new officers on the street, however I’m learning that the Administration was planning to do this a few months ago.
Sources tell me IMPD is planning to make up 200 conditional offers of employment to applicants who are going through the screening stage, with hopes of landing the 100 officers. They’ve completed the physical fitness, polygraph and interview stage. If they complete their background checks they are eligible to start at the academy when the new classes start later this year.
Sources say a decision was made last week by IMPD to combine the combine the October 15 and December 31 classes. It would take 22 weeks to train the officers and another 16 before they were fully sworn officers, so none of the new recruits would hit the streets until April of 2008.
The two classes would get the 100 applicants, the average class size is 55. The academy was not happy with this because of the large number of applicants; 55 is hard enough to manage so the quality of the training might suffer. However, the higher ups reportedly demanded they go to 100. This would explain why some of the new tax money would go towards training.
IMPD officials are meeting in the morning to talk about this, which leads me to believe there was no plan in place prior to the Mayor’s announcement today but this also begs another question. IMPD had four recruit classes scheduled between now and the end of 2008. October 15, 2007, December 31, 2007, June 23, 2008 and December 29, 2008. And assuming a recruit class size of 50 officers, we would eventually have 200 new officers. So are we really adding new officers or just speeding up the harvest by hiring people we were going to hire anyway?
This all seems a bit rushed to me. And I don’t know if this is the best way for public safety to operate. I want more officers on the street, but not like this. Besides, I thought we were only short by nine officers.
