LR police's 12 layoffs create records holdup

Five rehired to get files flowing again

After waiting several hours, Matt Malone, with the Crockett Law Firm, receives a copy of an accident report Thursday from a clerk at the Little Rock Police Department.
After waiting several hours, Matt Malone, with the Crockett Law Firm, receives a copy of an accident report Thursday from a clerk at the Little Rock Police Department.

— When Little Rock city directors slashed the Police Department's remaining operating budget by 25 percent earlier this month, the department laid off 12 part-time workers as part of its cuts - eight of whom worked in the records section.

That didn't work out so well.

Reports backed up in stacks. Data entry slowed to a crawl. Reduced hours at the public window where copies of reports are available generated lines that made a main hallway at police headquarters nearly impassable. And people complained - loudly.

"It was pretty clear that people were not happy," saidClimatine Tate, the records supervisor. "We were not happy, either."

The part-timers were out of work fewer than two weeks when the department opted to rehire five, placing them all in the records section. They returned to work Monday.

On Aug. 3, city directors ordered $288,000 cut from the $1.2 million remaining in the Police Department's $5.29 million 2009 operating budget, a pot of discretionary money that does not include personnel costs like wages and benefits. The department's total budget is nearly $50 million, said Sara Lenehan, the city's finance director.

Some of the money - about $47,000 - came from reducing the budget for uniforms. Othersavings came from elsewhere. The part-timers were just one more line-item that police officials decided had to go.

Department spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings said there is some money in the payroll budget for part-time employees, but it typically runs out well before the end of the year. When that happens, the money must be found elsewhere, he said, with one frequent source being the operations budget.

"With this cut, the money was gone; there was no more money to pay them," he said.

Hastings said the department hired five back when it was clear that there was no alternative.

The 12 part-time workers entered data, transcribed interviews, sorted, copied and distributed 67,000 reports a month and helped out at a window inside police headquarters where the public could order and pick up documents.

In the records section, left with five full-time workers after losing eight part-time workers, it was chaos.

"It was different," Tate said. "Kind of a disaster, kind of a nightmare."

The cuts meant that a window that had been open all day, five days a week, was open only on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. With some workers back, she said, she can keep the window open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

While she hired back the longest-serving part-time worker - who had almost 10 years with the department -Tate said she could not offer a job to everyone she wanted or needed.

"I'm still short-handed," she said.

Bringing back the five will cost the department about $40,000 for the rest of the year, said James Foster, the department's administrative services manager. He said cuts will be made as needed in other areas, such as overtime or equipment, to compensate.

But not every Police Department division that lost part-time workers has gotten relief.

Two part-time workers were cut from the department's Internal Affairs Division, which still has two full-time civilian employees. The part-timers have not been hired back or replaced.

Those workers answered phones, transcribed interviews with officers and witnesses forinternal investigations, updated the department's early warning system that helps identify problem officers, maintained all off-duty records for officers and helped with background investigations for applicants.

"It has definitely impacted us, I'm not going to lie about that," division Capt. Alice Fulk said.

Fulk said the division cannot let the quality of its work decline. That means some things will simply have to take longer to complete, whether background checks or investigations of officers.

"I'm a little worried about a slowdown," she said. "I'm frustrated. But this is our new reality."

The cuts in internal affairs come at a time when the department is trying to hire 20 new officers using $3.04 million from a Department of Justice grant that was part of the federal stimulus package. Those 20 openings are in addition to 22 existing openings, Hastings said.

Hastings, who also handles recruiting for the department, said he received 1,097 applications. Of those, 1,033 were eligible to take a written test, though only 437 showed up to do so. Hastings said 362 applicants passed the test, and 271 of those also passed a required physical test.

After oral interviews, the names of 242 applicants were sent to internal affairs to begin the intensive background-check process, Hastings said.

Before the department can hire anyone, Fulk said, the division must have a binder packed with hundreds of pages of information about each recruit, called "background books."

"Two people are basically going to have to pick up what four were doing," she said. "It isn't an easy thing."

Front Section, Pages 1, 10 on 08/22/2009

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