The Colorado Springs Police Department is planning a large increase in sworn personnel that could bring in up to 224 new officers, making up for those who have left in recent years and seeking to complete a promise city officials made to voters in 2017.

In his 2022 budget proposal, Mayor John Suthers included funding for 17 additional police officers, the final batch in a gradual budget increase that has provided enough money for an additional 120 officers. Suthers and other officials told voters in 2017 that the city could pay for more officers if they approved a fee that would fund federally mandated environmental improvements.

But the department has at least 90 fewer officers than it has funding for, and its latest recruiting numbers are lagging. The earliest the department could be fully staffed is August 2023. Still, the department’s response time – a metric cited by city officials in seeking more police department funding – is trending in a positive direction.

As of this month, the department had 692 sworn officers qualified to respond to calls, though it had enough money for roughly 786 officers, Police Chief Vince Niski told the  City Council. About 80 trainees are in the police academy, bringing the number of paid personnel up to about 770.

But the number of applicants for an April training class are down more than 30%, as police plan to roll out a new recruiting pitch that emphasizes Colorado Springs as a desirable place to be an officer. City residents have not placed the same scrutiny on the department as other cities saw after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.

“Our city supports CSPD,” he said at the Oct. 18 budget meeting. “We are not other large cities from across the country where their communities don’t support them. I do think we have part of our community that doesn’t, but I think you’ll have that anywhere. The larger part of our community supports CSPD.”

Staffing lags behind funding levels

Three recruiting classes are intended to increase the number of officers in the department.

Sixty-three officers have left the department this year, according to spokeswoman Natashia Kerr. That departure rate is roughly on par with last year’s, according to numbers presented by Niski to the council.

A class of officers will enter the academy in April, and another in December next year. It takes about 26 weeks for new hires to complete the academy, and they have to complete another 15 weeks of on-the-job training before they can respond to emergency calls by themselves.

“Bottom line is that we won’t receive the full benefit of all the positions that we hire and that will go through the academy next year until August of 2023,” Niski told the council. “But we are grateful for those positions, and we know that we need to stay focused on hiring high quality candidates to keep those positions filled.”

As of that presentation, the department had 78 officers in its academy, a class that started in September and is expected to graduate in March. If all 78 graduate, and the class has fallen from 84 in September, it will bring the department up to 770 officers out of the roughly 800 it will have funding for.

“The additional sworn personnel are essential to reducing critical incident response times and making our public safety capabilities among the best in the country,” Suthers wrote to the council in submitting his budget.

The majority of the officers’ salaries are paid from the city’s general fund, with the rest covered by the city’s public safety sales tax and a small complement funded by the Colorado Springs Airport.

During his budget presentation, Niski said the department would likely need to add more officers as the city continues to grow, and would aim to add a new police substation in eastern Colorado Springs in the coming years, but only after the department has enough personnel to staff it. He said the department has hired a consulting firm to project future population growth and evaluate its needs, and that its current staffing is based on the city’s size in 2017.

“We know that now is the time to prepare for that growth,” Niski said.

Response times are trending down

This year, median response times to priority one calls – incidents where there is an imminent threat to life – are lower than they were in four out of the last five years.

Through the end of September, the median response time for Colorado Springs police officers on priority one calls was 9 minutes and 16 seconds. That’s up only 9 seconds from last year, and lower than it was in 2016 through 2019.

“We are continuously looking for ways to free up time for our officers to address higher priority calls and improve our response times,” Niski told the council.

The department is implementing new software for records keeping and tip-reporting intended to save officers time, Niski said. One of the programs allows merchants to electronically report shoplifting incidents, reducing the need for officers to respond to stores.

The department is also moving toward having 57 full-time community service officers, unarmed department employees that can respond to calls that don’t require a police officer, Niski said, a new policy that he said was a “game changer.”

Recruiting numbers are down, but the department is preparing a new pitch

Applications for the department’s April class were down by nearly one-third when compared to those for the September class, according to Niski’s presentation. About 850 people applied for the April class, down from the 1,200 to 1,250 that applied a few months earlier.

Niski told the council he was optimistic the department could find 72 people to hire out of the applicant pool, which has dwindled to 250 viable candidates through the department’s background process.

As the department seeks to attract more candidates to future classes, Niski said it will impress on potential applicants the benefits of being a police officer in Colorado Springs.

“I think there’s still a cloud around being a police officer in the sense that I think that there’s a lot of family members that don’t want their sons and daughters or husbands and wives to be in law enforcement for numerous reasons,” he said in an interview this summer.

“I think we have to overcome all those and really convince people this is still an honorable profession. And it’s one when you come to Colorado Springs where you have the community support.”

In addition to the added scrutiny on police sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Niski has pointed to a police reform law enacted by the state last year that allowed officers to be held individually liable for wrongdoing as another factor discouraging people from policing.

Recruiting efforts that emphasize Colorado Springs’ support for police officers will start in earnest next year, although the department had done some advertising in more progressive cities that saw vocal Black Lives Matters protests.

The department is also creating a full-time recruiting position for a sworn officer, and a group of sworn and civilian personnel will be trained to attend hiring events, he said. The department is also updating brochure and billboard designs and writing new radio and social media campaigns, he said.

Mayor John Suthers, center, and Police Chief Vince Niski, Colorado Springs police chief, right, speak at a news conference this year.

Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette