AdMin Fax Screwup

As most coppers know, every month openings are posted to Districts and some Units where spots are available for bid. Bids are open for a few days, closed, then successful bidders move around on Change Day. Most times the bids are 3 pages - rules on bidding, openings, and a signature page. On rare occasions it runs to a fourth page. But the fourth page was never like this.

Here's the cover sheet - note that the AdMin Fax was originally supposed to be three pages long:

And here's page four, a memo (that probably wasn't supposed to see the light of day) listing what openings are to be posted for bid and what we can only assume is an actual real number of how many openings the district is short:

In case you can't read it, the list is as follows:

• 004 District 5 (openings) -41
• 005 District 3 (openings) -13
• 006 District 3 (openings) -14
• 014 District 2 (openings) -29

The first question we have is did they manage to fill all 40 openings in 003 last month since they don't even have a single opening listed? We didn't see 40 transfers headed that direction.

The next question is if 004 has 5 spots open for bids but they're really 41 officers short, wouldn't it follow that if 003 had 40 spots open for bid, they were actually 328 officers short? Parking must be easy as pie in 003!

In any event, the four districts listed are a combined 97 officers short and the Department is only letting 13 officers move around? And expanding those numbers, the entire "600 officer shortage" must be concentrated in the Patrol Division. So what about the Detective Division? We heard they're short a few hundred. Sergeants are short a hundred, lieutenants are short almost 50 and captains are around a dozen.

That "600 short" is looking more and more like a slight "miscalculation." And the shortages are a safety issue - not just for cops, but citizens, too.