The Bellwater Police Department is operating 24 officers below its authorized strength of 510, Chief Roberta Simms told the city council's public-safety committee Tuesday, a shortfall she said is driving up overtime costs and slowing response to lower-priority calls.
Bellwater Police Chief Roberta Simms told the city council’s public-safety committee Tuesday that the department is carrying 24 vacancies against its authorized strength of 510 sworn officers, the widest gap in her tenure. The shortfall, she said, has pushed overtime spending up 31 percent year over year, to a pace of roughly $6.8 million annually, and stretched average response times for lower-priority calls by nine minutes compared with two years ago.
Priority-one calls — crimes in progress, injuries, active threats — are still being met within the department’s target times, Simms emphasized. The strain lands instead on the calls beneath them: burglary reports, noise complaints, minor crashes and follow-up visits, categories where residents now sometimes wait hours. “The public measures us by the call they made,” Simms said. “I can hit every priority-one benchmark we have, and the resident who waited four hours on a break-in report will still tell you, correctly, that service got worse.”
Where the officers went
The department has lost 47 officers over the past two years, according to figures Simms presented: about half to retirement, a quarter to suburban and county agencies offering signing bonuses, and the rest to career changes out of policing entirely. Academy classes have not kept pace — the most recent graduated 14 recruits against 19 budgeted slots — and each recruit spends nearly a year in training before working independently.
Sgt. Paul Reyes, president of the Bellwater Police Officers Association, told the committee the vacancies compound themselves. Mandatory overtime, canceled days off and repeated shift extensions are cited in nearly every exit interview the union conducts, he said. “You cannot fix a retention problem by working the remaining people harder,” Reyes said. “Every vacancy makes the next resignation more likely. That is the spiral we are in.”
We are competing for the same recruit every agency in this metro wants, and we are doing it with older facilities, harder shifts and a pay scale that ranks fifth in the county. Loyalty to this city fills some of that gap. It does not fill all of it.
Roberta Simms, chief, Bellwater Police Department
A preview of the budget fight
The presentation lands weeks before budget season opens in earnest, and committee members treated it as an opening argument. Police funding is expected to be among the most contested items in the coming cycle, with some council members pressing for recruitment incentives and pay adjustments while others argue new spending should flow toward the civilian responder programs and violence-prevention work that reduce demand on sworn officers.
Council Member Terrence Boudreaux said his Lowertown constituents feel the shortage most acutely after violent incidents, when surge patrols appear for a weekend and then recede. But he pushed back on framing the fix purely in headcount. “I will support hiring,” Boudreaux said. “I will not support pretending that every problem on my streets is a problem only a badge can solve. Show me the plan for both.”
Council President Walter Kowalczyk asked Simms to return with a costed retention package — pay-scale adjustments, lateral-hire bonuses for experienced officers from other agencies, and a larger academy class — before budget deliberations begin. Simms said a lateral-hire bonus alone, at roughly $15,000 per officer, would cost less than the overtime those vacancies currently generate. “We are paying the money either way,” she said. “The question is whether we pay it for exhausted officers on their sixth straight shift or for rested ones on a full roster.”
City Manager Marcus Whitfield confirmed the budget office is modeling several retention scenarios but cautioned the committee that the city faces a tight year across every department. Any police package, he said, will compete with deferred infrastructure work and rising healthcare costs for the same limited dollars.
Recruitment, meanwhile, is fighting demographics as much as dollars. Applications to the department have fallen by nearly half over the past decade, mirroring a national trend, and the current applicant pool washes out at high rates during background checks and academy testing. The department has responded by loosening its tattoo policy, adding evening testing sessions for applicants who work days, and sending recruiters to Bellwater State, the community college’s criminal-justice program and military job fairs. “We used to pick from a line out the door,” Simms said. “Now we compete for every single name on the list.”
The shortage’s operational effects have surfaced repeatedly in recent months: property-crime detectives stretched thin during Foundry Row’s rash of catalytic converter thefts, patrol coverage gaps cited by residents after shootings in Lowertown, and specialty units borrowing personnel from patrol to keep major investigations staffed. Simms told the committee the department has protected its school-officer and community-services assignments so far, “but everything is on the table if the trend line doesn’t turn.”
Mayor Renata Ibarra, who did not attend the hearing, said through a spokeswoman that public safety staffing “will be treated as a first-order priority” in her budget proposal, without committing to specific figures. The public-safety committee scheduled a follow-up session for next month, when Simms is due back with the retention package and updated vacancy numbers. Reyes, leaving the hearing, offered the union’s short version: “Recruit, retain, or keep paying overtime until something breaks. Pick one soon.”