Montgomery County Police officials on Monday briefed the Public Safety Committee on patrol staffing, recommended additional hires and described heavy reliance on overtime to preserve near-term service levels.

PFM and department figures presented to the committee show a long-term rise in sworn vacancies: "In 2020, the department sworn vacancy rate was less than 1%. Today, it has risen to roughly 15%," PFMs Seth Williams said. Patrol vacancies are higher: PFM reported roughly a 19% vacancy rate in patrol, and noted that when light-duty and no-duty statuses are included only about 74% of patrol officers are available for service at any given time.

How patrol measured workload: Assistant Chief Darren Frank described two years of CAD-derived analysis run through deployment software (Kronos/Corona-type tools). The software combines call counts, travel times, scene time and administrative work, then applies an operational goal to estimate staffing needs. The department applied an operational target of 21 minutes per hour of available proactive time per officer as its planning goal and used a staffing factor (to convert required positions to hires) consistent with industry practice.

Recommended staffing: based on that model and command-level input the department recommended adding one lieutenant, five sergeants, 49 master police officers, 20 patrol officers and 28 support officers. Assistant Chief Frank said recommendations account for municipal partner coverage and geographic differences in workload.

Overtime and budget: leaders said response-time performance has remained stable (field unit mean under six minutes for priority calls), but that stability relies on overtime. The department exceeded its overtime budget by $11,000,000 last fiscal year and had spent 44% of its FY26 overtime budget in the first quarter, per PFM.

Recruitment and retention: personnel staff reported increased applications but modest hiring yields. The department received 989 applicants for the next class (PFM compared that with 519 applicants in 2024 in its presentation); for the January class the department had hired 13 officers with 67 still in process. Personnel staff also said 66 officers are currently enrolled in the Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP) and are scheduled to leave within three years, creating an additional near-term attrition risk.

Council questions and department responses: multiple council members pressed for transparency on operational assumptions, especially the 21-minute proactive-time target and the 105-minute per-shift administrative/ancillary time input. Patrol staff said the 21-minute goal is an operational choice informed by benchmarking and professional experience rather than a fixed national standard and that actual proactive time varies by district (15 to 40 minutes observed). Staff said they will continue to refine the model and that the software allows re-running scenarios as inputs change.

Next steps: committee members requested more documentation of model assumptions, current mean proactive-time figures by district and a clearer explanation of how the department will use recruitment and retention strategies to address the hiring gap. Staff said they will provide follow-up information and that a final ISB report from PFM will be presented to the committee in late January or early February.

Ending: Committee members and police leaders agreed to return with additional details and follow-up materials; no formal votes were taken during the session.