As staff shortages cripple some industries, a Central Michigan Police Department is dealing with similar effects and now officers are stepping down.
“There’s too much crime in the city, not enough officers, and our officers are leaving,” said Saginaw Police Sergeant Matthew Karpas.
This is the reason behind a video posted on YouTube by Carpus. He is also the President of the Saginaw City Police Command Officers Association.
“You can have bad leadership, or you can have bad pay, you can’t have both. And that’s the problem we have right now,” Karpas said.
Corpus said officers tend to overwork.
“He had a four-hour break between the 21-hour shift and the 24-hour shift. He’s sleeping in his car in the parking lot,” Karpas said.
There is a shortage of staff in the department.
“There are nights when we have four or five people working for the entire city of Saginaw,” said Karpas.
Which makes every innings a struggle.
“I think it’s safe to say that morale is at its lowest,” Karpas said.
This is giving officers a new place to work.
“They like the community. They want to serve the community, but it gets to a certain point where it becomes so much that the authorities can’t take it. And at a certain point it doesn’t deserve us ’ getting in return and that’s when people start leaving,” said Karpas.
Karpas said he’s working with the city manager to try and come up with some solutions to the staffing and retention issue, and that includes interviews with the exits to find out what some of Saginaw’s best heads of state are. Why are you at the door? But he added that just adding more new officers to the mix will not solve the current problem.
“We need to give our officers a reason to be here or else the city will keep training new officers, pay for new officers, invest a lot of new money in officers,” Corpus said. Karpas said.
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