DC Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton: "We completely agree with the President that crime in the District of Columbia is out of control and something needs to be done with it."
Video transcript
We completely agree with the president that crime in the District of Columbia is out of control and something needs to be done with it. We have to go back to how we got here, though. In 2020, the D.C. City Council passed an enormous amount of legislation that handcuffed police officers exposes them to administrative, civil, and even criminal liability, even when they do their jobs properly. And now, five years later, our authorized sworn strength is 4,000 sworn police officers. We currently have 3,180. So we have more than 800 vacancies for the position of police officer. And the way the department makes up for that gap is through 2 million hours of mandatory overtime every year. So the fact that we need help from federal law enforcement and maybe even the National Guard, it shouldn't come as a surprise, and we agree with that. I think one of the issues here, though, is that we all know that's going to be temporary. So in order to fix this problem and make sure that it doesn't ebb and flow and that the feds come in and we lower crime and then they leave and we're left holding the bag, it's very important that people know that there is underlying legislation that needs to be corrected. So that we can actually properly staff this police department in order to properly police the city.
Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.