This is an opinion column.
How many police officers does Birmingham have?
That should be a simple question, easy to answer.
But somehow, it’s not.
The Birmingham mayor’s office has been less than transparent, coming up with new numbers when the last ones are disproven. We’ll have to figure out this one by ourselves.
I’m sorry, but there will be math. And some word games.
Two weeks ago, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin stood before the City Council to tell them what was supposed to be the truth. News reports — including one column from me — had said the city could be short as many as 300 police officers. He was there to bring the council back to reality, he said.
Birmingham was short 63 “patrol officers,” Woodfin told them.
“Please set aside any other numbers you’ve heard,” he said in an emergency council meeting after the Hush Lounge mass shooting. “Set aside any other misinformation or disinformation or just made-up numbers. The delta in patrol is 63 officers.”
Disinformation, huh?
As it turns out, Woodfin’s number was the made-up one. He wasn’t even close to being right.
Before that day was over, Woodfin had to retract his 63 number and give another one after some folks in the police department threatened to share the truth. Speaking to Fox 6 later that same day, he said the number was actually 176 patrol officers.
Sixty-three wasn’t even in the right ballpark.
And 176 patrol officers — note that qualifier — wasn’t the full picture. That number didn’t include other officers such as homicide detectives responsible for investigating the city’s record-setting murders. Important stuff.
But if we’re going to figure out how many police officers Birmingham has, and how many it needs, we’re going to need a better source than the mayor.
Luckily, I know just the place.
A place where they cannot lie
Each year the City of Birmingham must file Certified Audited Financial Reports. That’s so the city’s bondholders can read those reports and decide whether their investments are safe.
Should someone knowingly file a false report, they might have to answer to the Securities and Exchange Commission or even the U.S. Justice Department. Unlike City Hall, this is not a place to throw around bogus information.
And those reports include all kinds of data, including how many police officers the city employs. Here is what they show.
For about a decade, the number of sworn police officers in Birmingham fluctuated between about 800 and 850. In 2021, the city reported that it had 839 police officers.
Then things fell off a cliff.
Between 2021 and 2023, the city lost 200 police officers.
That’s 24% of its police force gone in just two years.
The department is losing civilian employees, too, but more steadily and over a longer period. Between 2014 and 2023, the department dropped from 277 civilian staff to 177.
By the summer of 2023, combining sworn officers and staff, the Birmingham police department had at least 294 vacant positions.
Flying blind
The city’s financial reports stop in June 2023, and the 2024 report won’t likely be available until early next year. That leaves us with a blind spot for the last 16 months.
However, council members have seen more recent data to suggest things aren’t getting better.
In May, my colleague Joseph Bryant reported the city was short 296 officers. He didn’t make that number up, either. He got it from City Council President Darrell O’Quinn.
I called O’Quinn to ask where he got that number. He told me it came from a “position tracking” report provided to the council by the mayor’s office.
Since O’Quinn told me about the report, I submitted a public information request to the council’s public information officer, asking to see the report. She said I would have to ask the mayor’s office for it.
(Why the city council has a so-called public information officer who does not handle public information requests is a question I’ll leave for another day.)
I had already submitted a request to the mayor’s office for the last 10 years of staffing numbers. The mayor’s spokesman, Rick Journey, said that information was “incomplete and difficult to assemble due to varied ways such data has been tracked through the years.”
Good thing I had those audited financial reports, or I might have had to take his word for it. However, It was a lot of fun to explain to him that someone did track the numbers and the data was all on a page of audited numbers shared publicly by the city every year with the bond markets.
Last week, Woodfin’s office released yet more numbers. They now say the department is short 223 officers, including 172 patrol officers. That data does not include civilian employees.
Are those numbers right? Who knows?
But here’s the bottom line: We know that from 2021 to 2023, the Birmingham Police Department lost about a quarter of its police force — on Woodfin’s watch.
How many police officers does Birmingham have now? The best answer I can give you: Not nearly as many as it needs.
This is a crisis. And it didn’t begin with a mass shooting in Five Points South. It didn’t start with the record-setting pace of homicides this year. It has been a problem for some time.
At least the mayor is now acknowledging the problem exists, unlike when my colleague Bryant wrote about it in May.
That didn’t stop Woodfin from trying to claim credit for being on the ball sooner.
“I think it is important that we tell you that today is not a new conversation, that we have been active, we have been intentional about recruiting and retention efforts well prior to September 2024,” Woodfin told the council members in that meeting two weeks ago.
Intentional, huh?
Active?
I’d be more at ease if the mayor had been able to answer a basic question.
Openly.
Correctly.
The first time.
How many police officers does Birmingham have?
