Shawn Vestal: Part of SPD’s resource challenge is the need to deploy more officers to calls

Last year, a whole lot of police cars filled my street one afternoon – six or seven units, including a K-9 rig.

They were searching for a suspect in a car theft and shooting, I was told by one of the officers, but did not find him. Most of the time during the incident, several officers stood ready in case something happened. They were obviously there as backup in a worst-case scenario, which didn’t unfold.

As they slowly dispersed, I was left wondering: How many officers could there possibly be left elsewhere in the city, if this many responded to one incident?

Also: was my impression correct that this was a lot more muscle than you might have seen a few years ago?

Not long after, in the course of reporting on a story about a perpetual longtime burglar in Spokane, some residents related how surprised they were at how many officers showed up to arrest this burglar – after the neighbors themselves had detained him.

I wondered if this was a pattern or an anomaly, and asked SPD. Turns out it’s true, for several reasons: While there isn’t an exact ratio or statistic, “It is fair to say more officers are required on many call types now as compared to years past,” Cpl. Nick Briggs wrote in an email message last November.

The biggest factors: An emphasis, including in recent state legislation, on using larger teams to “de-escalate” potentially violent situations without the use of force, and the need to protect officers at a time when attacks on police, and gun violence in general, are more widespread.

This seems relevant to the current situation with SPD’s ballooning overtime bill. I’m not raising it as a criticism – I have no earthly idea how many officers is the right number for any given situation and I’m in favor of the push to de-escalate crises and protect cops.

But it seems like a pertinent element, if not the major one, in the current resource crunch at SPD, where there are simply too few cops for the job at hand.

The department is on pace to blow way past its budget for overtime this year. This has been routine in recent years, but even as the city has increased the OT budget, SPD is outpacing it dramatically – it’s on pace to spend $7.24 million on overtime this year, well over the budgeted $4.2 million.

The biggest reason is serious staffing shortages set against increased crime reports. The department is now short 70 positions, or roughly a fifth of its authorized force, and Assistant Chief Justin Lundgren told council members last week that with difficulties recruiting new officers and upcoming retirements, the problem is likely to get worse.

Even at full staff of 356, SPD falls below national averages for the size of its police force. The FBI says the national average of 2.3 officers per 1,000 residents; our city’s rate is 1.5.

Governing.com, which gathers data and information for leaders of local governments, says the average officer staffing rate per 10,000 for cities between 200,000 and 500,000 is 18.7; Spokane, with a population of roughly 230,000, is at 15.5.

Again, that’s at full staff, and we’re well below that.

No one questions the underlying challenges, but given that the department’s use of overtime is basically unchecked – it simply comes to the City Council after the time has been clocked and asks for the money – some council members wonder if the department could do a better job of managing its resources, or at least raising budgetary problems earlier.

Councilwoman Lori Kinnear was irked that the department, which knew it was soaring over its OT budget as early as February, waited until the year was half over to sound the alarm to the council, which holds the purse strings of city government.

“The overtime is just not being dealt with in an appropriate and timely fashion,” she said in an interview. “They are coming to us after the fact. … We should have learned about it four months ago, five months ago.”

Which brings us back to the number of officers being deployed per incident. No one is raising that issue as the major factor involved. But in a resource-thin environment, more people over here means fewer people over there. And the reasons for a sometimes-larger response reflect some of the key changes in the relationship between the police and the community at large.

A key reason for sending out more officers, or adding specialized teams, on riskier calls is the effort to defuse potentially explosive situations. Recent legislation required departments to put an even greater focus on de-escalation.

As SPD spokeswoman Julie Humphreys put it last year, “De-escalation takes time and it takes a lot of resources. More officers has been shown to diminish the use of force needed to resolve an incident.”

She also said that the department has had to activate its SWAT teams twice as much this year as last.

Briggs noted that the presence of more officers may make someone in an encounter with police less likely to fight, as well as making it easier to use team tactics to minimize the use of force. And in the case of potential violence against police, more officers make it easier to defend and respond to ambush-style attacks, he said.

People also tend to underestimate how many officers are needed, or what they’re doing, in a given situation, he said.

It’s not as easy, in other words, as looking out your window and thinking you can tell what’s what.

Editor’s note: This column has been updated to correct Cpl. Nick Briggs’ rank.