A blue wooden sign with golden engraved letters reads "City of Syracuse, Dept. of Police" on a green lawn outside of the police station downtown. A blue sky shines down on the scene.
Syracuse Police headquarters on South State Street in downtown Syracuse. Credit: Julie McMahon | Central Current

A study of Syracuse police staffing released Monday found one way the department could more efficiently use officers is to civilianize some roles within the department. 

It’s just one of a bevy of recommendations made by a consulting group the city hired in 2022 to look at police operations. The study, released with a companion report by Auditor Alex Marion, made 87 recommendations for how the department could better operate. 

It was commissioned by the Common Council in 2022 and cost the city about $155,0000. Matrix Consulting Group, a San Francisco-based firm that touts its expertise in analyzing local governments, performed the study. 

The report does not give a specific number of officers the department needs to function. The department is currently budgeted to have 423 officers, though it has about 40 fewer than that number. 

Marion released a condensed report alongside Matrix’s final report and marked the broad areas where Matrix made recommendations, including: 

  • Civilianizing some roles within the department to put more officers into police jobs
  • Reforming the community service officer pay structure to have tiers
  • Working with the Onondaga County 911 call center to evaluate how 911 calls are prioritized 
  • Creating a Syracuse police-only civil service list
  • Creating a new administrative bureau and reassigning non-police jobs to other city departments. 

In a response to the study, Chief Joe Cecile wrote that he agreed with many of the recommendations in the report. 

The department has tried to civilianize roles within the police department since it hired former police chief Kenton Buckner in 2018. 

Marion’s report and the study recommended transferring the duties from some sworn positions to civilian roles, transitioning some jobs into a new administrative bureau within the department and transferring some jobs into other city departments. 

Civilianizing roles as recommended in the report would not decrease the number of officers in the department. It would take officers away from non-police jobs, like overseeing human resources, and put them back in policing jobs.

Cecile wrote in his reply to Marion that he agreed with some departmental reorganization. That would include moving some responsibilities — ordinance and licensing, parking enforcement, school crossing guards and some hiring and personnel management — to other city departments. 

While Cecile wrote that he agree creating an administrative bureau overseen by a non-sworn employee made sense, he also wrote there might be challenges with “labor” — the police union — and hiring for the leadership position. 

“The much larger recommendation of creating an Administration Bureau and splitting off several divisions … to be overseen by a high-level civilian has merit, and could be a future consideration,” Cecile wrote. 

If the department were to take the report’s recommendations, the new administrative bureau would include four departments currently overseen by police that could be overseen by civilians. Those departments include human resources, records and IT. 

The 12 roles the study specifically targeted for civilianization include: 

  • The lieutenant overseeing Syracuse police’s Audit and Budget Control Division
  • A sergeant in the department’s property division
  • The police officer assigned to the department’s Accreditation and Innovation section
  • The police officer in the Technology and Program Management section
  • The sergeant overseeing the Ordinance and Licensing unit
  • The lieutenant overseeing the Human Resources division
  • Six of the department’s evidence technician roles, which would entail six officers being transferred to patrol roles 

The officers in those roles would then be transferred to more traditional policing roles. 

Undertaking a revamp like this would then require the department to hire more community service officers, non-sworn civilians who work within the department. 

Marion wrote that the department should create classifications within CSOs to distinguish them by experience, qualifications and responsibilities. 

Click here to read a copy of the report.

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Chris Libonati is the former managing editor of Central Current. He was a founding editorial member of the organization and was hired as Central Current's first reporter. He previously worked at the Syracuse...