By Gregory Smith
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — For nearly a year, city officials have been planning the 66th police training academy, intent on keeping up the size of the police force as the crime rate increased.

But the city’s fiscal crisis has overwhelmed that plan, and the academy has been put off indefinitely. Police Chief Dean M. Esserman is now jumping into President Obama’s $4-billion stimulus sweepstakes for law enforcement, eager to win a grant to hire the novice officers who would graduate.

The Police Department had made a special effort to recruit members of minority groups for the academy, trying to ensure that its ranks would better reflect Providence’s predominant population of racial and ethnic minorities. And Mayor David N. Cicilline arranged passage of a law to indirectly give minority group members a preference in hiring.

In mid-October, the city announced recruitment for an academy, advertised in foreign-language publications and urged the leaders of minority groups to persuade candidates to come forward. Applications from 1,264 candidates poured in during a six-week enlistment period, and the department winnowed the number to 299 after conducting written aptitude and physical tests.

That is where the process stopped, as the department waited for the City Council and the mayor to enact an ordinance granting city residents preference in hiring. Cicilline announced the proposed preference in January and acknowledged that, given the city’s demographic complexion, the initiative would be expected to advance more minority candidates in the competition.

The preference was adopted last month, but then the academy was quietly called off.

“The academy that we had planned for … April has been postponed indefinitely due to the financial problems that the city is facing right now,” said Deputy Police Chief Paul J. Kennedy.

Esserman and his commanders for years have used the expression “cops count” to drive home a point that the number of officers wisely deployed can decrease the incidence of crime. The force now stands at 482, or 7 fewer than authorized in the original city budget for fiscal 2009. That complement may dwindle without an academy to graduate the planned 20 to 30 officers to compensate for attrition due to retirement and other reasons.

Crime last year surged by 12 percent, and violent crime by 19 percent — although a change in the way records are kept skewed the rate upward. In the first quarter of 2009, however, the rate of crime declined by 17 percent compared with the same quarter a year earlier. Violent crime went up again, by 4 percent.

“The grim reality is that as the economy worsens, crime tends to rise and you need more police, not fewer,” said Maj. Stephen M. Melaragno, police director of administration.

Cicilline declared that public safety remains his number-one priority and that he will do everything he can to maintain the size of the force. The pace of retirements, he said, has slowed of late.

The mayor has a $16.1-million operating budget deficit for the fiscal year that ends June 30. All departments, including the police, were ordered to draw up options for spending reductions of 5 percent or 10 percent, with either option to be invoked within the fiscal year depending on the severity of the crisis.

Esserman has acknowledged that he intends to apply for aid under the Department of Justice COPS program — Community-Oriented Policing Services — to have the money necessary to hire officers. Only if he wins a grant would it then make sense to hold an academy.

“That’s our plan,” he said. “…That’s what we’re working towards.”

The cost of operating the academy and the likely cost of hiring the officers were not immediately available Wednesday. Providence police recruits are paid minimum wage while they attend the four-month academy and an entry-level officer is paid an annual salary of $47,272 plus fringe benefits.

If Esserman lands money from the COPS program it would be a reward of sorts for the time and effort that he and Cicilline have invested in the Obama administration. The chief and the Democratic mayor have been among those who successfully lobbied the administration and Congress for more aid for cities, and law enforcement in particular.

COPS has swelled to $1 billion, thanks to an infusion of money from the economic stimulus law known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Police departments may apply for money on a competitive basis under a COPS category called CHIRP — COPS Hiring Recovery Program — that would cover the cost of hiring police officers at entry-level pay and benefits for three years. After three years, departments would be obliged to keep the officers on the payroll.

If Esserman gets the money to hire academy graduates, the department intends to proceed with the screening of its current crop of 299 recruits rather than restart the recruitment process from the beginning.

Over the years, the selection of recruits repeatedly has been hampered by litigation as people pressed claims that they were treated unfairly. Cicilline said initially that the Providence residency preference would be retroactively applied to the current crop although only insiders would have known about the planned preference before it was announced.

To avoid possible litigation, Kennedy said the department has since decided that it will not apply the preference to the current recruits.