ST. LOUIS — Just two police officers were initially assigned to a district just south of downtown one day this week, and they both called in sick, leaving the department scrambling to staff the area.
Police labor leaders said the two cops who called in sick were scheduled to work the 3 to 11 p.m. Wednesday in District 3. Before the callouts, a third officer was already staffed to work overtime in the district as a stop-gap measure to fill in for other officers who were out on leave.
“So you have one person for the whole district on overtime,†said Joe Steiger, business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association. “They reached out to District 4 and got some help, but it was certainly not ideal.â€
The shift on Wednesday evening was the latest instance of the agency’s yearslong struggle with staffing, as it’s struggled to hire officers and retain current ones.
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“When we don’t have enough officers to respond to the numerous calls, it’s not fair and it’s not safe,†said Sgt. Donnell Walters, president of the Ethical Society of Police, a police group that represents Black officers.
District 3’s border follows Chouteau Avenue west from the Mississippi River to Grand Boulevard and south to Meramec Street. It encompasses several neighborhoods including Soulard, Lafayette Square, Tower Grove East and parts of Dutchtown.
“It’s going to get someone hurt. An officer is going to get hurt,†Steiger said.
Sgt. Charles Wall, a spokesperson for city police, confirmed that “multiple officers†assigned to that area called in sick and there were already officers out with injuries.
But Wall emphasized that the department has resources to address short staffing such as offering overtime pay to other officers and “supplemental support units.â€
“We have these options available in order to ensure, despite any staffing challenges we may face, that we are able to provide continuous and high-quality police services to the residents of St. Louis,†Wall wrote in a statement. “Staffing challenges are unfortunately not new to our agency.â€
There have been in of other police departments calling out sick en masse to protest various issues, known informally as catching the “blue flu.†Laws in all 50 states prohibit police strikes.
But Wall said unprompted that wasn’t the case on Wednesday.
“There is no evidence suggesting that this was a coordinated effort, and we continue to have policies in place to monitor sick time usage and address potential issues,†Wall wrote in a statement.
The department is budgeted for about 1,224 officers but employed only around 937 as of Friday, not including trainees.
Steiger said around 220 of those vacancies are positions for the rank of officer — the cops who would respond to calls and patrol the city.
Neither the department nor the city will disclose how its 940 officers are assigned, citing security concerns and personnel issues that are not covered by the state’s Sunshine Law.
The police department in 2014 cut the number of districts in the city from nine to six. When that switch was made, Steiger said the agency intended to have 90-100 officers assigned to each district to split three shifts, but they’re “nowhere near that,†he said.
In addition to officers, the department has struggled to hire and retain police and 911 dispatchers.
According to internal department memos recently obtained by the Post-Dispatch, officers on 18 separate shifts from June through August were told to limit interactions with the public that did not begin with a call to 911 because the department did not have enough dispatchers to run the channels for the city’s six districts and the special units channel.
