San Bernardino Sun - San Bernardino Gets Grant for 11 New Police Officers

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By Ryan Hagen

The Police Department received funding for 11 new officers from the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing this week, community policing week.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced $119 million in grants to departments nationwide Monday, and Tuesday Rep. Pete Aguilar trumpeted the $2.8 million award to the San Bernardino Police Department.

The grant will provide funding to hire more officers to fill patrol openings in target areas, improve crime identification measures and cultivate community relations between law enforcement and San Bernardino residents, said Aguilar, D-San Bernardino.

"Our community has been through a lot in the past year, none of which has been made easier by the increased violence we've seen on our streets locally. Reducing violence is a multistep process, but this is a good place to start," Aguilar, D-San Bernardino, said in a written statement. "This funding will allow SPBD to have the resources they need to keep our neighborhoods safe and to foster important community relationships so we can hopefully see San Bernardino's elevated crime rate diminish."

The grant provides 75 percent of the funding for 11 new San Bernardino officers for three years, allowing the department to increase its budgeted positions to 259 sworn officers, said Police Chief Jarrod Burguan.

"We are at the point where we are starting to rebuild some of our capacity," Burguan said. "We had to move some people back to patrol just to handle some basic calls. We've gotten enough people through that we'll continue adding folks to patrol, adding to investigations, adding to proactive and community policing."

As Aguilar noted in a letter supporting the department's grant application, the number of budgeted positions fell 36 percent from its 2008 peak of 334.

But having money to hire police is only half the problem: The city has also struggled in recent years to fill the positions it has.

The number of officers on the force is in the 220s, Burguan said Tuesday.

"Hiring has been a challenge for us and this doesn't alleviate that challenge, but it gives us more potential," he said, with hiring ongoing and officers consistently working through the police academy.

Aguilar's letter points to the city's spike in homicides -- the number is now 50 -- and said FBI and Bureau of Labor Statistics data rank San Bernardino the most dangerous in California.

"To make matters worse, San Bernardino's current officer-to-resident ratio of 0.9 officers per 1,000 residents is far below the FBI recommendation of 2.4 officers per 1,000 residents for a city of San Bernardino's size," he wrote. "The first seven months of 2016 have produced dozens of homicides and the city is still recovering from the devastating terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center on December 2, 2015. In spite of this, San Bernardino remains a resilient community."

San Bernardino is the only police department in the county to receive COPS grant money this year, and received the second-largest grant in California next to Los Angeles' $3.1 million, according to the Justice Department.

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