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By Cari Spencer, Minnesota Public Radio News

Minneapolis police officials laid out plans Thursday for the department’s proposed $230 million budget next year — a 6 percent increase compared to the current budget.

In his presentation to the Minneapolis City Council’s budget committee, Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the department’s current sworn force of 578 officers is still far below the level of staffing that’s budgeted, despite applications being up 45 percent compared to all of last year.

This year, over 1,000 prospective officers applied, leading to 60 new hires. Council member Emily Koski called out an earlier budget presentation from the Office of Community Safety that proposed half a million dollars for MPD recruitment efforts — building off the $1 million campaign launched in spring.

“I’m not seeing us actually having a problem getting people to apply,” Koski said. “I would rather put those dollars toward figuring out what do we need internally to make sure we get these good applicants through the process.”

Koski said the city needs to think creatively about ways to invite some of those applicants into other roles, “so if they want to be an officer that doesn’t preclude them from working within our public safety ecosystem and learning about the city and then transitioning.”

O’Hara said “getting more people across the finish line” is a priority. But even then, he said, some new hires take at least a year to be educated and trained before they can start patrolling city streets, while officers continue to retire. Thirty officers retired this year.

“Hiring more people for sworn positions isn’t actually giving us a benefit on the street immediately like we need,” O’Hara said. “And we need to be hiring many more people just to keep pace with normal attrition.”

The proposed budget includes 31 more positions within the department, including two additional civilian investigators. Those are non-sworn staff okayed in the new police contract to help with caseloads and potentially free up sworn officers for other duties.

O’Hara told the committee that he specifically wants to see one of those positions take on domestic violence cases, as staffing for domestic violence investigations has decreased since 2020.

Council member Robin Wonsley has pushed for the budget to carve out more civilian investigators, as the department faces a backlog of cases. She said two civilian investigators aren’t enough and is proposing a budget amendment to address the backlog.

“This new contract cost taxpayers nearly $9 million, with the new staffing flexibility touted as a crucial reform that was worth the cost,” Wonsley wrote recently in a newsletter. “This amendment would take more advantage of this reform by adding more civilian investigators to MPD who can help improve case closure and clearance rates.”

O’Hara said in his presentation to council members that investigations staffing is less than half of what it had been prior to 2020.