In the past week three Mandan Police Officers were injured on-duty in unrelated cases and they are all expected to miss work for a period of time. One officer was injured while attempting to arrest a suspect, a second officer was injured during a foot pursuit and a third officer was injured during a fall.

We are hopeful that all three officers will have a speedy recovery and won’t be out of service for an extended period of time, but it’s difficult to know for sure. We do know that none these officers can return to patrol duties until they have recovered 100 percent, because their safety and yours could depend on it. It’s absolutely essential that they have regained all of their physical abilities in order to meet the physical demands of the job.

Injuries to our police officers have a tremendous impact on department operations. The well being of our police officers is critical to the services we provide as well as any enforcement efforts. With just 20 patrol officers assigned to the street, three of those officers are injured, another officer is in the basic training academy and another officer position still remains unfilled. Essentially, our patrol staff is down five officers, or 25 percent.

I think everybody can relate to the challenges posed by that type of a reduction in workforce and the efforts you have to make to compensate for their absence. From our police department’s perspective, these types of manpower shortages affect emergency preparedness, response time, available hours to conduct follow up investigations, proactive enforcement efforts, community involvement and officer training.

The financial impact is also significant for on the job injuries. The overtime budget gets used up, which means that later in the year officers may not be able to work the extra hours needed, there are lost man hours, reduced productivity, medical bills and even insurance premiums.

Unfortunately, in public safety there are limitations in our ability to prevent on the job injuries because of the inherent risks involved with this type of work. While officer safety is always paramount in everything that we do, if a suspect decides to resist arrest or flee from an officer, it’s a choice they made in which we have no control over. Officers have to do their jobs and be cognizant of the level of force they use to stay within the parameters of the law and department policy.

We will get by as we have in the past by juggling schedules and paying officers overtime to cover shift shortages, but we will be working with less staff and services are impacted. Unfortunately, when you’re working with less staff it puts all of the officers at more risk, and it gets to be a vicious circle.