Little Rock ties string to police bonus; recruits who stay 2 years keep $5,000; 1 year nets $2,500

Little Rock police recruits who leave the department before completing two years of service will have to pay all or a portion of their $5,000 graduation bonuses back to the city.

City Manager Bruce Moore announced the new rule this week.

Last year, the city began giving the signing bonuses to police academy graduates with no stipulations.

Now anyone who resigns within one year of graduation will have to repay the full $5,000 bonus, Moore said Tuesday night. Anyone who resigns after one year but before two years will have to pay back half, or $2,500.

Little Rock reviewed its bonus incentive after city anti-corruption blogger and city Board of Directors candidate Russ Racop discovered that two recruits out of the first class of graduates last year left the department within six months of receiving the bonus.

There were three recruit classes in 2017. The first had eight graduates. One of them resigned after three months to join a different police department. Another, the class's top recruit, said the job's hours were too rigorous for his family and that it wasn't the life he wanted. He said he was going to go to law school.

It's unknown whether either recruit returned the $5,000.

Last year's second recruit class had 18 graduates, and all are still with the department. The third, which graduated last week, had 22 graduates, all of which are still with the department.

"The interesting thing about that is [the first class] didn't know they were getting the bonus," Moore said.

That was the first class to get the new incentive, which was meant to reduce police vacancies.

The Little Rock Board of Directors asked Moore to look at the incentive policy after hearing criticism that there were no strings attached to the bonus. There were worries that people could game the system by graduating from the police academy, getting the bonus, then quitting.

John Gilchrist, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police union, said Wednesday that he's pleased with the new rules added to the bonus pay.

"Initially, City Manager Bruce Moore wanted to make that a hiring incentive instead of a retention incentive. It generated a significant amount of negative response from not only the [union] members but from police officers, because they thought he was rewarding people who had never spent a day on the streets, and the manager had not done anything to reward the police who had been working shorthanded for so many years," Gilchrist said.

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He thinks part of the reason the union was so successful in negotiating raises for police officers this year is because Moore was trying to make up for that, Gilchrist said.

He had asked Moore to put some sort of stipulation on the bonus. He said he thinks the $5,000 incentive works, but the investment needed rules to safeguard it.

"I told members of the [Fraternal Order of Police] that we went to the city manager and the chief and said, 'You've got to do whatever is necessary to get people here and employed.' We were looking at over 100 people short at the time," Gilchrist said. "It would be awful critical for me to go to Bruce Moore and say, 'I appreciate what you're trying to do to get people here, but I don't like the way you're doing it.'"

He said some people in his union will think the reimbursement rules are fair, and others will think they aren't significant enough.

"I can't speak negatively about it. I'm certainly one of the ones that had been to the manager about [setting up rules]," Gilchrist said.

Last year, the Little Rock Police Department was short more than 80 officers at one point.

It is authorized to have a sworn force of 593 police officers.

With the 22 recruits who graduated last week, the department now has 525 sworn officers.

If the 35 recruits who are currently in the academy and the 19 who will start in a few weeks all graduate and become officers, the department would be up to 579 sworn officers with just 14 vacancies.

Gilchrist said Little Rock hasn't met its fully authorized strength since it was set at 574 officers two police chiefs ago.

A police academy class will start this month and another will start in August. The August recruits are the first who will be bound under the new rules attached to the bonus, since this month's recruits have already gone through orientation.

"I'm hopeful that we will be at or very close to our authorized strength by the end of the year," Gilchrist said.

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