The tragic death from COVID-19 of Chicago police Officer Marco DiFranco, announced Thursday, underscores the urgent need for law enforcement agencies across the country to take aggressive and unprecedented action. This type of extraordinary response is necessary not only to protect officers from illness, but also to ensure sufficient resources are available to continue to protect the public.
Public safety depends on the ability of our law enforcement agencies to continue to operate at a minimum of full capacity. The Chicago Police Department, already under the pressures of a federally mandated consent decree, has been in a state of transition over the past several months. On the same day DiFranco’s death was announced, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the selection of former Dallas police Chief David Brown as the next Chicago police superintendent. Brown takes over CPD in the middle of this coronavirus pandemic.
Most recent reports indicated that more than 70 Chicago police officers and two civilian department employees have tested positive for COVID-19. As of Friday, about 1,000 CPD officers and civilian employees combined were on sick leave, which is about 7% of the department.
The situation will almost certainly get much worse before it gets better — the New York Police Department has had over 1,400 officers test positive and has over 17% of its workforce on sick leave, an alarming number in itself.
The most important ingredient to maintaining readiness is a healthy workforce able to deliver services that are essential to maintaining even a basic level of public safety. Due to challenges recruiting a sufficient number of officers in recent years, most agencies do not have sufficient staffing to lose many officers to illness or quarantine before public safety is challenged.
In order to protect officers and allow officers to continue to protect the public, every law enforcement agency in the country must adopt a comprehensive COVID-19 plan. At a minimum, the plan must incorporate training, protective equipment, operational response, pre-shift health screening, post-shift hygiene and contingency plans if staffing levels are depleted below a safe minimum.
Maintaining even the minimum level of police protection in many cities will only happen if police leaders take unprecedented, proactive steps to protect officers and other essential employees from infection, then identify and quarantine infected employees. Police executives must immediately implement ways of protecting their officers from infection and, at the same time, identify officers who are infected as early as possible. A few promising strategies are being implemented in some cities.
The Miami Police Department has led the way on carefully screening employees when they report for duty, including taking the employees’ body temperatures. This approach is being used widely by hospitals and other health care facilities. The idea is to identify infected employees as early as possible to have them further evaluated before they are exposed to other employees, in hopes of preventing spread.
Seattle opened the nation’s first COVID-19 testing facility dedicated to testing first responders, health care professionals and others in essential front-line roles in this emergency. In addition to protecting the health of those who are protecting us, we must ensure, to the extent possible, that infected individuals are removed from their professional roles and placed in quarantine before spreading infection.
No matter how many proactive measures are implemented, every agency must also plan for unthinkable contingencies. How many officers could be sick at one time? How many will be quarantined? Most agencies cannot tolerate even a loss of 10% of their essential workforce at one time. The only way to rapidly grow the ranks of a law enforcement agency with properly trained and vetted officers is to temporarily rehire recently separated or retired officers. The time is now to implement this strategy.
Based on what we have already seen overseas — as well as in Chicago, Seattle and New York City — this virus spreads exponentially and doesn’t discriminate in any way. Law enforcement leaders are writing the book right now on how to maintain continuity of law enforcement operations by maintaining the health of these committed public servants.
Jason Johnson is the former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, a position he held from 2016 through 2018. Since January 2019 he has served as president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund based in Alexandria, Virginia.
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