MORGANTOWN — The state of the city’s police department was a prominent topic during a recent discussion between Morgantown City Manager Kim Haws, Mayor Jenny Selin, Deputy Mayor Danielle Trumble and The Dominion Post Editorial Board.
Haws said both the city’s council and administration are prepared to raise salaries within the Morgantown Police Department pending an ongoing salary study of law enforcement agencies in the region.
Further, Haws said the city is considering walking back recent changes to policy that eliminated shift differential as it pertains to the MPD and, potentially, employees of the Morgantown Municipal Airport.
City leadership concedes other agencies competing with the city for officers have caught or surpassed the city in terms of pay.
In recent months, the West Virginia State Police, Monongalia County Sheriff’s Department, WVU and Westover have adjusted officer pay. And those are just the agencies operating in and around Morgantown.
“That’s why we’re doing the study, because we want to keep an edge. We want to be able to pay our folks right,” Haws said, noting GovHR’s study should be complete in the next 30 days. “I think the salary side of it is a localized issue, and I know council, and we’ve all talked about it, if we need to adjust those salaries up, we’ll do that.”
In terms of the recently implemented changes to city policy, Haws said he understands employee concerns and concedes that, at least in terms of the police department, incentives like shift differential are likely necessary.
But 30 years of uneven, outdated policy have created an untenable situation that he intends to address, even if it makes him unpopular.
“For instance, there’s no provision in the old policies for the accrual of comp time, and yet law enforcement had 13,000 hours of comp time saved up. Where’d that come from?” Haws said. “I don’t blame the officers at all. A department head or somebody made the decision, ‘You know what, we need to do this,’ but it wasn’t standardized. Now here we are faced with this.”
As for shift differential, Haws said it may need to return, but only for specific positions.
“We’ve made some reasonable concessions over the last couple months. One of those is shift differential. The purpose is to incentivize people to want to work crazy shifts; some added incentives. We’ve always practiced shift differential, but the problem is it became expected in certain areas whether we needed it to incentivize the position or not,” he said.
And while pay and benefits are major factors, they’re not the only reasons more than a quarter of the MPD’s allotted officer positions are unfilled.
Law enforcement has taken a hit in terms of public perception, and thus recruiting, following the May 2020 death of George Floyd and subsequent summer of demonstrations and rioting.
That issue was brought home to the MPD with the creation of the Morgantown Civilian Police Review and Advisory Board in May 2021, which, as initially envisioned, would have had the power to subpoena and investigate claims of officer misconduct.
It was ultimately struck down by the courts and significantly reworked following a lawsuit brought by the Monongalia-Preston Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #87.
But officers took offense to its creation, which came despite legal warnings to the city from the West Virginia Attorney General’s Office and despite the department’s track record in the community.
Selin said the MPD has always been a progressive department, pointing to initiatives like the creation of a soft interview room for trauma victims and a general willingness to engage with the individuals and groups within the community.
“The people who were working on that had some specific concerns, but it was also a lot of just filtering through the national concerns and wanting to have prevention here and trying to work with the department and citizens,” Selin said, later adding “Some of the citizens within the neighborhood associations were concerned because we’d always had a good relationship and they didn’t want that to change, but I think other people saw it as something that was just coming with the times.”
Why so many MPD positions are open is one discussion. How to fill those positions quickly is another.
The city recently hired five new officers, and has four more coming on in the next 30 days or so.
But that’s just the first step.
According to Trumble, the state says it will be a year before those hires can get into the West Virginia State Police Academy.
“Recruiting is down, but also those that we do hire we can’t get into a state police academy for over a year. So we’re looking at things like potentially offering a bonus to any new hires that are already certified and wouldn’t have to go through a police academy,” Trumble said. “I think that would be great.”
Even better, Haws continued, would be an option beyond the WVSP Academy.
“I’m on the board with Fairmont State University to create within their criminal justice program its own academy,” he said, explaining the first classes will launch in January after an eight-year fight.
“It’s taken us eight years to break the stranglehold the state police has over the academy. They don’t want to give that up and they don’t want to add another one. So, it creates a bottleneck,” Haws said. “Competition is good for everybody.”
