It's Your Business: Chamber ready to support Bloomington in recruiting new police officers

NOTE: This "It's Your Business" column by Chamber CEO Eric Spoonmore was published in the March 10, 2023 edition of the Bloomington Herald-Times.

President & CEO, Eric Spoonmore

The Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce believes the most fundamental role of government is to protect the safety and well-being of all residents. In January, I addressed the Bloomington City Council to express concern about what seemed to be an increasing number of high-profile crimes in the community over the past several months including rape, stabbings, shootings, attempted murders, murders and other violent behaviors.

In February, the city of Bloomington delivered its annual State of Public Safety report to the community, which confirmed violent crime in the city has increased by nearly 6% over last year. Any increase in crime rates — and particularly violent crime rates — is of significant concern to the business community.

It is also important to recognize that the increase in violent crime in our community is not solely a policing issue; much of the problem can be attributed to a lack of public health investments in addiction and mental health services. The Chamber fully supports the law enforcement agencies who make many sacrifices each day to protect and serve our city, working tirelessly around the clock to keep residents and businesses safe. We recognize that police work is difficult and that many communities around the nation are experiencing significant police officer shortages. The Bloomington Police Department (BPD) is currently understaffed by nearly 20 sworn officers.

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City officials recently confirmed that since Jan. 1, 2020, BPD has experienced 37 departures from its sworn officer ranks. In that same timeframe, 21 new officers have been hired to backfill the positions. The shortage of sworn officers only exacerbates current public safety challenges for both BPD and the community. Safety always comes first, and a fully staffed police department should be the baseline for achieving optimal levels of public safety.

The Chamber stands ready to support city leaders in any effort that will aid with recruiting more public safety personnel to work for the city of Bloomington. Given the increasing trend of troubling behaviors in the community, we encourage elected leaders to act with the highest level of urgency to address the current police officer shortage and ensure that our highly skilled police department has all the personnel and resources needed to meet its critical mission to the community.

We applaud the efforts of city leaders to increase compensation and provide a variety of innovative incentives to recruit police officers to Bloomington.

However, we cannot expect the city alone to solve all the public safety challenges in our community. Addiction and mental health disorders are significant contributing factors to criminal behavior that require targeted, public health-oriented solutions. For example, Monroe County’s syringe exchange program should be regularly evaluated through the collection of data to ensure that outcomes are consistent with the public health goals and expectations of the community.

Further, we must make more public health investments in substance use disorder and mental health services to get people the help they need before committing a crime. We are hopeful that the state Legislature will prioritize funding these initiatives at the local level in the current legislative session.
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Public safety challenges are often complicated and difficult for any single entity to solve. The best solutions require collaborative and innovative approaches that are inclusive of the private sector, public sector and nonprofit community. Local government leaders have demonstrated they can ambitiously pursue many innovative local initiatives, including the new gigabit fiber infrastructure project and dramatic decreases to carbon emissions. I am confident that our community can use that same spirit of innovation to make Bloomington and Monroe County a safer community for us all to live and work together.