The Silver Spring Penguin

Despite the county’s crappy financial state, the third police district is still on tap to put more officers on the beat, Silver Spring’s top cop says.

“None of the budget cuts will reduce the number of officers or staffing levels at the district stations,” top brass Capt Don Johnson told The Penguin via email.

The third district recently rolled out 11 rookie cops, six of whom trained in other districts. On top of that, eight recent police-academy grads on Sunday started their field training in the third district, Johnson wrote.

“The field training takes about three months,” Johnson said. “These officers will then be an addition to staffing levels in the third district.”

The proposed budget cuts — all $23.6 million of them — also won’t affect the third district’s ability to borrow cops from other districts, Johnson said. Cop swaps happen only when a district is overwhelmed with calls or hosts a major event. The third district did borrow officers in November, Lt Stephen Auger previously reported.

“These officers are already working and therefore do not have an impact on overtime,” Johnson explained.

As far as the next fiscal year goes, Johnson couldn’t predict what would go down in the third district.

“I can tell you that currently there are 37 officers in the police academy who will graduate in July of 2008, and another class of approximately 35 is scheduled to begin in July of 2008,” he wrote.

While the county government hacks away at the current fiscal year’s budget, discussions on next fiscal year’s budget are already cooking. An open forum hits Long Branch on Thursday, Jan 24.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Dan Dan the Binary Man.