Annapolis Police Chief Edward Jackson lobbied City Council members Feb. 16 to repeal a problematic ordinance that ties police staffing numbers to the city’s population.

Instead he would prefer the department be given the resources to conduct a “workload study” and base staffing on calls for service, response times and other factors.

Jackson made his case at a council work session called to address the city’s adequate public facilities ordinance, which since 2006 has set the number of police officers the city should budget for based on a formula of 3.2 police officers per 1,000 residents.

“We need to commission that study to explain what we should have in terms of numbers,” Jackson said. “We need a more realistic approach to say, ‘These are numbers of men and women we need to have.’ ”

The chief said he has myriad problems with the 3.2 police officer-to-1,000 resident ratio, starting with the fact that no one knows the origin of that calculation.

“Since I’ve been here, I never understood what 3.2 meant anyway,” said the chief, who arrived in 2019. “It’s a mathematical equation that nobody can explain.”

City manager Michael Mallinoff thought the number might have come from Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based law enforcement think tank. But Tom Wilson, a retired major from the Anne Arundel County Police Department who has worked for PERF since 2013, said that’s not the case.

“It didn’t come from us,” Wilson said in an interview. “In fact, we strongly urge police departments not to tie their staffing levels to population.”Ward 8 council member Ross Arnett is the only person still on council who helped draft the 2006 APF ordinance. He says he doesn’t remember where the 3.2 number came from, but Dave Cordle, a former council member with a background in security, pushed for police to be included, Arnett said.

The current guidance from Maryland’s planning department, issued in 2007, does not recommend including police resources in adequate public facilities ordinances. Instead, the state recommends that whenever major new construction is planned, municipalities determine whether a project will place an undue burden on infrastructure such as water supply, sewers and stormwater management.

Some municipalities, including Annapolis, also look at whether additional residential units could overcrowd schools.

Respective city departments review proposed projects and can force developers to make changes, or pay fees to fund improvements such as adding traffic lights. Once those agreements are in order the city issues an adequate public facilities certificate for the project and construction moves forward.

But while developers can easily install a new stormwater culvert, they cannot help the city recruit more police officers. Following national trends, the department has struggled to stay fully staffed in recent years, and as of January it was 17 officers short of its own 124 staffing goal.

A judge intervenes

The Annapolis adequate public facilities ordinance says “no exceptions” should be granted for the police APF, but to allow new developments to proceed the police department began approving construction plans if the developers agreed to certain crime mitigation measures, such as security cameras and private security staffers.

“I was fine with the mitigation until the court ruling,” Jackson said.

He told council members he had been signing off on the certificates, as requested by the mayor and city planners, because he “wanted to be a good soldier.”

That practice came to a halt in April 2022, when a judge ruled the city had to stop violating its own law, creating a de facto construction moratorium for major projects until the city either changes the APF ordinance or hires enough officers to meet the 3.2 ratio.

The case was initiated by a pair of Eastport residents who successfully challenged the adequate public facilities certificate for The Lofts at Eastport Landing, a redevelopment project at Eastport Shopping Center.

It was months, however, before the city of Annapolis informed other developers that the ruling meant their projects would be delayed indefinitely. At least two council members also were unaware.

In addition to the Eastport Lofts, at least three projects are now on hold: Godspeed Senior Housing, Parole Place and The Willows, a 58-unit income-restricted community that Housing Initiative Partnership, a Hyattsville nonprofit, has been seeking to build since 2019.

If the affordable housing community is not complete by December 2024, HIP and its development partner Ingerman would forfeit a federal tax credit package to finance the project and not be allowed to reapply for two years.

Agreeing on a problem, but not solutions

At Thursday’s meeting Mayor Gavin Buckley and several council members were at odds over how to solve the problem.

In January the city’s Office of Law sought help from Linda Schuett, a local land-use specialist who has previously served as city attorney. She prepared a presentation on overhauling the city’s entire adequate public facilities ordinance, including revising language about fire sprinkles, which are much more common now than when the legislation was written nearly two decades ago.

Ward 7 Alderman Rob Savidge said he was disappointed the mayor hired an outside lawyer and pursued the overhaul without first consulting council. He, Arnett and Ward 6 Alderman DaJuan Gay also protested when Buckley attempted to prematurely cut off discussion and push forward with a presentation on City Dock renovations.

“We requested this meeting specifically to talk about the police APF,” Savidge said. “We wanted to get our heads around that.”

“I wanted to talk to the chief,” Arnett added, throwing up his hands.

Buckley told him he wouldn’t be able to, although 40 minutes later the chief was at City Hall, answering questions and sharing his own frustrations with APF.

Draft legislation that Schuett and the Office of Law prepared — including both a long-term overhaul and short-term fix for The Willows — were not released to the public. Ward 4 Alderwoman Sheila Finlayson sounded open to cutting the police force numbers from APF, as the chief requested, but she wanted Schuett’s advice.

“I would support that,” Schuett said.

There is no other municipality in the state that has an APF ordinance for police, the lawyer said.

An Annapolis expert on ‘the $64,000 question’

If the city dropped the 3.2 ratio from the APF ordinance and instead determined police staffing based on a workload study, Jackson warned the council that he may return to City Hall requesting an even larger budget.

“We need to expand the Annapolis Police Department,” Jackson said. “A commission may tell us that we need 150.”

A theoretical workload study would take into account not only population but the influx of visitors for special events and increased training requirements that take officers off the streets.

“I suspect we are going to find out that 3.2 is woefully understaffed,” the chief said. He thought it was possible to contract out and complete the study within 90 days.

Over the past decade dozens of North American communities looking for police staffing guidance have turned to Annapolis resident Peter Bellmio. As a law enforcement consultant, Bellmio analyzes data for clients including Miami; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and the province of Ontario and city of Toronto.

“It’s always been the $64,000 question,” Bellmio said. “How many police do we need? What is the bundle of services that is going to make the city safe but also allow us to maintain a certain quality of life?”

Bellmio helps departments analyze factors like total number of calls per year and how much time officers spend on each type of call to determine how many officers a community needs. He also looks at things like land use and weighs, for example, the number of calls to a strip mall against calls in a residential neighborhood.

“It’s facts and figures,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, but you’ll get it right. You don’t just pick a number.”

Although Bellmio could never imagine it 10 years ago, much of his consultation work has shifted to asking questions like, “How can we reduce the workload and make sure we are deploying officers in a way that matches the staffing?”

The two key areas he’s identified include reducing “false alarm” calls, where officers report to a school or business and find that human error has set off an alarm, and assisting communities in developing “Crime Prevention through Environmental Design” standards, also known as CPTED. Both can help reduce police workloads if departments work with local officials to pass new laws.

For example, cities can impose fines on businesses where officers are frequently called to false alarms and enshrine CPTED standards into design and building codes.

“Eyes on the street,” is how David Holden, a development principal at Ingerman, likes to sum up CPTED standards. CPTED features at The Willows include situating parking lots between buildings and in front of windows, which helps reduce crime such as vehicle break-ins. Plans also call for on-site management, extensive lighting and security cameras.

Bellmio said these planning-and-design factors can reduce crime. “Prevention is cheaper than intervention,” he said.

Although he’s lived in Annapolis since 1997, the city has never hired Bellmio as a consultant. (He did do one project for former Mayor Ellen Moyer as a volunteer.) He believes the solution in Annapolis is to drop the police-officer-to-population ratio, recalculate the total number of officers based on community needs and then make those calculations an annual assessment required during the city’s budgeting process.

“Get an analyst, somebody from police and somebody from planning, and get them to the table,” he said.