Crime In DC: Washington Police Must Hire More Officers To Reduce Violence, Council Member Says

RTSWR5K — Police help a vehicle with supporters of President Donald Trump leave the vicinity of the Women's March in Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2017. Reuters

The Washington, D.C., City Council was scheduled to vote on adding more officers to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Tuesday, NBC Washington reported. Council members met Monday to discuss several options surrounding the number of new recruits not matching the number officers retiring from the force.

Council member Vincent Gray proposed emergency legislation that would offer retention bonuses to those who are eligible to retire. The MPD has roughly 3,700 officers but was looking to add 500 more officers to the force to adequately combat the city’s violent crimes.

DC Council Considers Hiring More Police Officers https://t.co/MaVKHMRIgk #DC pic.twitter.com/jFISdTB9Lm
— Washington DC News (@washdcnews) February 7, 2017

The legislation would set aside $63 million for officers of retirement age and offer them contracts to stay on the force for five more years, with their salaries doubling in the final year, local news outlet WTOP reported.

"We’re not talking about people who are way past the point where they’d be a part of a patrol effort," Gray said Monday. "These are people who are really at the prime of their career, who are choosing to go on to other jobs or on to another police force just to do something different."

Former Police Chief Cathy Lanier told the D.C. Council that the city could not recruit and train officers as fast as they were losing them because the majority of the current high-ranking officers were hired in the 1980’s and were now at retirement age.

The prospects of beefing up the MPD was opposed by nearly 200 protesters who insisted that adding more officers was not the answer to curbing the violence in the city, according to NBC Washington.

Eugene Puryear, one of the protestors outside of the city council meeting who was part of the Stop Police Terror Project said adding more officers was not the right move. The District of Columbia should be looking more toward options such as creating community mentorship programs, not increasing the ranks, which would, Puryear said, enhance the "divisive tactics of the police" and "racial profiling."

There were 135 homicides in Washington D.C. in 2016, according to the Washington Post. That figure represented a 16.7 percent decrease from the number of homicides the city saw one year earlier.