Summer along the Ocean City boardwalk was well underway last year when inside the police substation, a 23-year-old seasonal officer unholstered his gun and raised it in mock anger toward a colleague.
“Relax with that,” the colleague said.
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The officer had drawn his firearm as a joke, something he’d done a few times when others made comments he didn’t appreciate, according to an internal affairs report. He’d joined the force about a month before the incident after four weeks of training. Now he was quickly fired.
The dismissal brought the department’s already short supply of seasonal officers down to just over 40, exacerbating a dilemma squeezing the resort town: how to safeguard its image amid heightened scrutiny of police while deploying younger, less-trained officers to protect the tourists upon which its economy depends.
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The town of 7,000, which swells to several-hundred-thousand during the summer months, befell national scrutiny last summer after videos depicting violent arrests of Black teenagers there — including one involving a seasonal officer — went viral, prompting lawmakers to call for reform. It was the second night in a row the seasonal officer had tried to tackle someone — during his second week on the job.
The same challenges await as the town gears up for another Memorial Day, and another Senior Week of young people crowding the boardwalk to celebrate high school diplomas. Department officials say their latest class of several-dozen seasonal recruits will be ready, imbued with full police powers and a fraction of the training permanent officers receive — something no other police force in the country does.
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“What Ocean City, Maryland, does is a problem for the profession,” said Gainesville, Fla., police Asst. Chief Terry Pierce, who retired as a captain after nearly three decades with the Montgomery County Police Department. He likened it to letting a doctor perform surgery before obtaining a medical degree. “You’re lowering the standards.”
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Recognizing the liabilities, department leaders have warned in recent years that the program’s continued viability is in jeopardy, while town officials have pushed to continue it, enjoying the budgetary advantage of beefing up the police force for a few months each year at a relatively low cost.
Ocean City police Lt. Dennis Eade, who now heads the department’s training section, started himself as a seasonal officer in 1997 while he was a college student in Upstate New York.
“If they tell me to prepare seasonal police officers and have them ready for the summer, that’s obviously what I’m going to do,” Eade said. “We are comfortable and confident that the officers we’re putting out there are quality, and that the number of officers we’re putting out there are providing for safety for our visitors and our residents here in Ocean City.”
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Each June, thousands of high school graduates converge on Ocean City for Senior Week. Young people, many drinking alcohol, roam the boardwalk, stagger in and out of rental houses, crowd hotel balconies. The partygoers then and throughout the summer share the boardwalk with families, empty-nesters and retirees.
Department officials say trying to maintain a family-friendly atmosphere and keep everyone safe amid the huge population influx simply requires more police officers. While the department also augments its force each summer with dozens of “public safety aides,” who are unarmed and do not have police powers, officials say these employees cannot handle the range of calls that require fully equipped and empowered officers.
Ocean City has hired seasonal officers going back a hundred years.
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Other beach towns, such as Rehoboth Beach, Del., and Asbury Park, N.J., rely on seasonal officers, but they are not armed.
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Bernadette DiPino, Ocean City’s police chief for about a decade beginning in 2003, said commanders she met at national law enforcement conferences were often surprised to hear about the seasonal program and the powers her officers were given. But she was proud of the training they received, she said. “I almost could say that my full-time officers sometimes used more poor judgment than some of my seasonals, you know?”
In 1988, state lawmakers had carved out an exemption to state training requirements, allowing Ocean City’s seasonal officers to hit the streets after less training than other officers. The law applied to agencies that employed “at least 100 non-full-time police officers” per year — a criterion only Ocean City met.
In 2009, citing budget limitations and recruiting challenges, town officials discussed decreasing the number of seasonal officers to below 100. Town officials asked then Del. James Mathias (D-Worcester), to sponsor a bill to lower the threshold, but he declined.
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A few years later, the department decided to stop relying on the seasonal officer exemption. Instead it began bringing in officers each summer under a provision of state law that allows new hires seeking permanent jobs to serve as probationary officers while still training.
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To qualify as probationary officers, the recruits now had to undergo a battery of testing, including polygraphs and psychological screenings. In 2015, Chief Ross Buzzuro told the City Council that nearly 80 percent of recruits failed the testing process.
Those who pass take a four-week training course in May that includes the same firearms training required of permanent officers. It also includes use-of-force training, which by state regulation must include anti-discrimination training, and other subjects such as defensive tactics, constitutional law and drug enforcement.
Still, Ocean City’s probationary officers hit the streets each summer — armed with badges and guns and full police powers — after 265 training hours, less than a third of the more-than-900 generally received by Maryland police officers. They’ll be paid $18.20 an hour this summer, up from $16.36 last year.
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“It’s the real deal,” says a voice-over from a former seasonal officer, in a recruitment video the agency deployed in 2016, which begins with a clip of two officers jumping out of a police SUV with lights flashing and a siren blaring. “I am riding in a patrol car, in a uniform, with a badge. I was a real cop.”
The department received 158 applications for the job in 2020, down from 646 applicants in 2014. In 2016, the agency hired about 80. Last year, it hired 43. This summer, it’s on track to bring on 30-something.
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Police officials have attributed the decline in part to what they say is significant anti-police bias among their target recruiting pool of college students. The increased testing and training have also made recruiting more difficult.
Those who do sign up will inevitably face difficult situations, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a police think tank in Washington.
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“The problem is that there’s more scrutiny of police officers, whether it be full-time or seasonal, then there ever was before,” Wexler said. “There was a time when a month of training might be sufficient, but today it’s harder to make that argument,” he said.
During council meetings in recent years, Buzzuro and his staff have expressed concerns about the program’s continued viability.
“As we all know, there's an increased demand and an increased focus of police accountability and reform, and this is what's driving a rising standard within the police department — which it's very, very difficult to meet with a provisional or seasonal officers program,” police Capt. Michael B. Colbert told the council in 2020.
The risk of falling short of these rising standards increases the town’s liability, Colbert said. Department officials also worry about a change in law or regulation that would force a sudden stop to the program.
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Colbert said that because of the concerns, department officials wanted to reduce their reliance on the seasonal program by adding more year-round officers, as well as more public safety aides.
That year, Buzzuro persuaded the council to approve 10 new full-time officer positions to bring the total to 117. The department hoped to increase the number of full-time officers to 140 over a few years. But today the number stands at 116, leaving the department in a continued squeeze for manpower during the summer.
Early last June, a few weeks before the officer was fired for waving his gun, another seasonal officer tried to cite a teenager for vaping, and one of the teen’s friends began yelling profanities. The seasonal officer reported that he “initiated a takedown to gain compliance” after the friend assumed “a fighting stance.”
The very next day, the same seasonal officer found himself in another use-of-force situation after he and another seasonal officer encountered a 19-year-old vaping along the boardwalk as he celebrated Senior Week with friends from Harrisburg, Pa.
After the teen wouldn’t produce an identification and tried to leave, the seasonal officer rode his bike in front of him and told him to put his hands behind his back. The teen, like the young man the night before, assumed “a fighting stance,” and the seasonal officer pulled him to the ground, a police report said.
Viral video taken that afternoon by a bystander doesn’t include that initial interaction. But it shows a veteran officer, after the scene had escalated further, kneeing the teen hard in the rib cage as he and three other officers pin him face down on the wooden planks, trying to get him in handcuffs.
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To be sure, it is not only Ocean City’s seasonal officers who have been involved in high-profile incidents where tense situations have escalated in recent years. A video from May 2020 shows Lt. Frank Wrench being berated by a young man seated on a bench along the boardwalk. The lieutenant strode over and punched the man, still seated, in the face.
“Just a heads up … I had a use of force tonight,” Wrench told a fellow lieutenant in an email hours later, according to records obtained through a Maryland Public Information Act request. “No injuries. Lots of cameras around though and kids who didn’t like that I punched a kid in the face who was resisting arrest. One punch. Hopefully no national news outrage.”
In his initial police report on the incident, Wrench wrote that he’d punched the man after he resisted being put in handcuffs. Days later, he amended the account to acknowledge that the blow came before any officer tried to handcuff the man. The department found his use of force within policy, and Wrench received the department’s Silver Star Commendation for exemplary service that year.