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Yarmouth police warn overtime, vehicle shortages and recruitment gaps strain budget
Summary
At a virtual Finance Committee meeting, Police Chief Fredericksen told members that mixed call-logging, contract-driven overtime increases and supply-chain delays for cruisers have left the department off-budget and seeking clearer 10‑year trend data; the committee asked for deduplicated incident files.
Police Chief Fredericksen told the Yarmouth Finance Committee that the department is “not on track for our budget this year,” largely because of overtime pressures tied to recent contract changes and COVID-related staffing gaps. The chief said a large calls-for-service number presented to the committee mixes patrol work, training and administrative logs, and asked committee members to review raw data with staff for clarification.
The committee pressed for better comparability. “If you actually had uniform UCR statistics,” George Perkins said, “we’d know what we’re talking about.” Deputy Chief Lennon added that the 9-1-1 system logs a single incident number per 9-1-1 call, which helps avoid duplicate incident counts but still leaves categories that are not directly comparable across years.
Why it matters: Committee members said 10-year trend files and a deduplicated view are necessary to judge whether declines in some categories (the chief cited burglaries dropping from a high in earlier years to near-record lows recently) reflect real crime trends or changes in reporting. Fredericksen said traffic stops account for 4,622 entries on the report and that salary lines rose about $258,000 this year due to contractual changes; an overtime restoration of $50,000 was also cited as a budget change this fiscal year.
Details: Fredericksen described how staffing, training and nonresponse events (for example, vehicles out of service or officers in training) can inflate the calls-for-service total. He offered to sit with committee members to walk through line-by-line reports. The chief also noted vehicle-replacement delays tied to manufacturer shortages and chip shortages, and described the department’s participation with a DEA task force that brings some investigative capacity and associated overtime.
Next steps: The committee requested the police department provide the 10-year breakdown and clarified UCR-style counts, and to meet with staff for an in‑person review of the datasets before the next budget decisions. The Finance Committee then moved and voted to recommend the department’s budget as presented.
