Baltimore Police Make Progress in Reversing Years-Long Hiring Shortfall

BALTIMORE -- Baltimore Police have hired about 70 more sworn officers than the department has lost in 2025, reversing a years-long trend of hemorrhaging staff.

The large candidate pool is more diverse than previous years, and far more prospective officers live in the city. But the department is still about 400 sworn officers short of its ideal staffing level of about 2,600 officers, a gap that Deputy Police Commissioner Brian Nadeau hopes it can close by continuing its aggressive recruiting campaign.

The net gain of about six dozen officers this year “is good, but it’s not where we need to be,” Nadeau said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun.

On top of preventing the agency from instituting reforms listed in its consent decree with the Department of Justice, the l ong-running shortage of officers has been blamed for copious overtime spending and burnout.

Recruitment at the department plummeted, and departures ticked up, in the wake of Freddie Gray’s in-custody death in 2015, the prosecutions of the officers involved (three were acquitted, and then-Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby ultimately dropped charges against the other three) and the agency’s subsequent agreement with the Justice Department to overhaul its policing practices.

Mike Mancuso, president of the Fraternal Order of Police lodge representing city officers, said the positive change was due to the union negotiating more competitive salaries and benefits. But the city is still “extremely short-staffed,” and any “relapse” in a negative direction for salaries will lead to few new recruits as well as veteran officers fleeing for other departments or retiring, he said.

With a new marketing firm and a $32 million budget for recruitment, the department has been hiring about 20 officers per month on average this year, according to figures provided by a police spokesperson. The agency has received more than 3,300 applications this year, “a tremendous amount,” Nadeau said. Meanwhile, spending on recruitment has ballooned to more than $1.6 million so far this year, according to city spending data.

Nadeau attributed the improvements in staffing to big-picture changes, such as the department using targeted social media campaigns — last fall, it entered a two-year, $550,000 contract with Phoenix-based EPIC Productions for marketing services — and offering “concierge” services to applicants.

“You apply, you get assigned to somebody. They walk you through all the testing. They walk you through the physical agility test. They help you along the way, making sure that you’re completing everything correctly,” Nadeau said.

But Nadeau also pointed to little details, like new uniforms being more comfortable and the police academy being moved to a more modern, “welcoming” location at the University of Baltimore.

All of those changes have steered prospective applicants toward the department and helped out with officer morale, reducing attrition, he said.

Widespread overtime pay driven by staffing shortages at Baltimore’s public safety agencies has made some first responders the city’s highest-paid employees, and the hefty expenses prompted the city to institute a spending freeze earlier this year. City officials said in May that overtime spending caused by vacancies across the city government could reach $150 million for the 2025 calendar year.

Payroll data released in December shows that police department employees made about $68.9 million above their annual salaries in fiscal 2025, about $10 million less than the previous fiscal year. Five police supervisors — two captains, two sergeants and a lieutenant — each made more in fiscal 2025 than Police Commissioner Richard Worley’s gross pay of about $311,000.

The shortage is also holding up Worley’s plans to cut overtime spending with a new 12-hour shift schedule, he said at a Dec. 9 City Council hearing. Done correctly, such a change could cut down overtime spending and boost morale, but at the current staffing level, it may be unsustainable and could force officers to take on more extra shifts.

But Worley said he thinks the department can get there, noting that a large group of prospective officers — over 160 — is currently training at the police academy, and more applicants are on their way.

The department’s staffing woes have been a top–line issue at consent decree hearings, with the judge overseeing the agency’s implementation of policing reforms frequently referring to a staffing “crisis.” U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar’s tune had changed a bit by October’s hearing, when he praised the department’s “robust, energetic recruiting” efforts that appeared to turn the tide, but warned that inadequate staffing is still “a key bottleneck” in instituting reforms. He noted that officers with heavy workloads are unable to perform community policing tasks at the core of many of those reforms.

A mid-December report from the consent decree’s monitoring team recommended that Judge Bredar find the department in “full and effective compliance” with the staffing mandate, noting that the consent decree “does not require that BPD reach full staffing.” Figures filed with the court show that new hires have consistently outpaced attrition almost every month through November, with an average of about 10 sworn officers leaving and 19 trainees starting each month.

Contributing to the recent slowdown in attrition, Nadeau believes, is that the “folks who didn’t want to adapt to the change” have already left.

He said the department’s recruitment efforts are targeting potential applicants outside of the traditional routes. While departments often aim to recruit people from police families or people with a military background, the department is casting a wider net.

“Really, what we’re looking for is a wide, diverse group of people that want to come out, work with the citizens, work with the community, and be part of the community policing aspect,” Nadeau said.

For more information about department’s recruiting and hiring process for sworn and non-sworn positions, go to https://joinbaltimorepd.org/faq.

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