At any rate, this gives us a very useful yardstick to use in evaluating the report that we have from our task force in determining what extra expenditures we should put into the snow removal problem.

We know already that we should buy some specialized equipment and by specialized equipment we are thinking primarily of the larger types of plows, so that we can move heavy drifts that we were were faced with in the last snow and where we did not have the capability of removing these 6- and 8-foot-deep drifts.

We are also looking seriously at buying some snow-melting equipment, which we know is used at some of these northern localities. This equipment has the effect of removing the snow and converting it to water, the snow going into the front end of the equipment, melting it in a central heat unit, and releasing it at the rear of the unit by a hose, where it is placed in the storm sewer system.

These items are quite expensive and therefore we don't think that we should buy too many of them, but at the moment, Mr. Airis and I do feel that we will probably recommend the purchase of a limited number, say a couple of them.

Outside of this, sir, I can only give you a very general rundown. I have maps and other things to demonstrate the procedures that we follow during snow removal operations.

The CHAIRMAN. Obviously this again is a cost item. This is money required to meet this need. If I understand you correctly you are saying that you are recommending an expenditure of $2 million to acquire additional snow removal equipment?

General DUKE. No, sir; I am sure it will not reach that magnitude. The task force report, based upon the rigid criterion that we gave them, came up with a list of equipment that would amount to a $2 million purchase. But in our review of this report, I don't feel that I should recommend to our Board for subsequent recommendation to the Congress, that we should go to that length. It will be somewhere I don't think I could give you a figure now-but it will probably be in the range of half that amount or less.

The CHAIRMAN. You are saying you might have to buy a million dollars or a million and a half dollars more worth of snow removal equipment? I am not holding you to any fixed figures. I want to get an idea of how much money you want to spend.

General DUKE. It could well be in the range of $1 million. It will basically depend on what we want to adopt as our objective, whether we want to try to remove it in 24 or 48 hours, and this sort of thing. The CHAIRMAN. What was the cost of the snow removal in the recent blizzard?

General DUKE. On this one, we spent roughly $1 million in about a week's period.

The CHAIRMAN. What did you spend last year?

General DUKE. In all of last year we spent roughly under a million dollars all last year.

The CHAIRMAN. How about the year before that?

General DUKE. The year before that was a little higher-about $1,300,000.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you spend about $1 million or more per year for snow removal over the past 10 years? I realize you have mild and rough winters.

General DUKE. As a rough guess, I would say we average probably about $1.1 or $1.2 million per year.

We have an item in our appropriation for $285,000 each year and we absorb in our two major departments that are involved in the balance of these costs each year.

The CHAIRMAN. If you secured an additional $1 million worth of equipment how much would it cost to operate it and take care of a blizzard as we had this past winter?

General DUKE. It would cost considerably more.

The CHAIRMAN. Would it cost about $1 million to $1 million more? General DUKE. I would have to be very vague in answering you on that, sir, but offhand I would say that the operating costs each year would not come up to the initial acquisition costs of the equipment. What we want to do in the final study is to develop a balance between the equipment we want to buy in the near future and the operating costs that go along with it. We want to develop a blend of these two so we have a proper balance.

We have to keep in mind that we also hire and contract for a considerable capability, particularly in the plowing area, during the snows. We actually feel we ought to increase that capability and contract with more private firms for several reasons.

This gives us much more flexibility in the case of snows and, secondly, it does not take people away from their normal jobs, such as trash collection, garbage collection, and this sort of thing. The more we have to use these people for our own in-house capability of snow removal, the longer the citizens suffer before we can reestablish these various services.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. I have no further questions on that particular subject. Unless Commissioner Duncan or anyone has anything further. I again compliment you on a very fine presentation. I have no further questions to ask of you. I intend next to call Chief Layton and then after Chief Layton, Dr. Hansen, to touch the school problem and the police problem.

With that you are excused and thank you. You can keep whatever supporting personnel are here as backups to the Chief or Dr. Hansen.

STATEMENT OF JOHN B. LAYTON, CHIEF, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT

The CHAIRMAN. Chief Layton, we are glad to see you. You may proceed.

Chief LAYTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am appearing here today, of course, at the request of your committee to express my personal support for the revenue measures recommended to the Congress by the Board of Commissioners and to comment briefly on the relationships of those revenue proposals to the programs and operations of the Metropolitan Police Department.

I might best begin by defining, or modifying, my qualifications to comment on matters of revenues of the District. As the head of a single operating department of the District government, I have only a general, rather limited acquaintance with the overall financial condition of the District government.

However, the Metropolitan Police Department, as you know, is a department which spends about some 12 percent of the total operating

budget of the District; it is a department with a budget which has more than doubled over the past 10 years in response to a doubling of its workload as well as rising personnel and other costs; and it is a department for which significant additional financial support was made available, last year, will be needed this year, and likely will be needed in years to come as an alternative to legislative action, which is needed but has not yet been accomplished, to effectively strengthen its operations.

The CHAIRMAN. What does that mean?

Chief LAYTON. I am referring, Mr. Chairman, to the legislative proposals that were introduced into Congress last year having to do primarily with questioning procedures of arrested persons.

The CHAIRMAN. In other words, if the Mallory rule were changed do you think that would be of great assistance to your force?

Chief LAYTON. Yes, Mr. Chairman. We have been limited in our ability to question defendants after their arrest, and this stems from the Mallory decision and the interpretation of that decision in our appellate court here in the District.

The CHAIRMAN. But you have issued certain police regulations that are very similar to the Senate-passed version of title I of the omnibus crime bill.

Chief LAYTON. Yes, we have, Mr. Chairman. On the authority of a letter from the U.S. attorney we have issued a departmental order which does set up some guidelines. It does permit some limited stationhouse questioning, provided certain specific warnings are given to the defendant prior to that questioning.

The CHAIRMAN. You are operating under that directive at the present time?

Chief LAYTON. Yes, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. What has been that effect? Has it been helpful to you?

Chief LAYTON. Yes, Mr. Chairman. That has been helpful in the matter of having an opportunity to question defendants. Prior to the issuance of that letter which was last July, Mr. Acheson, the U.S. attorney, had previously, in October of 1964, addressed a letter to the Chief of Police in which he said that he felt that the status of cases of decisions at that time indicated that there should be no questioning of defendants once they had been brought to the stationhouse or to headquarters.

This letter of July of last year enlarged on that and considered some of the more recent cases. Working together with his office, we have set up these present guidelines and administrative procedures. This does give us an opportunity to question defendants for some limited period of time. A time limit was set-sort of arbitrarily, with the upward limit of 3 hours being set, but the directive that we issued in the department also indicates that we should keep that time down to as short a period of time as possible.

Our experience under these procedures has indicated that our personnel are doing just this. We find that with the type of warning that is given we have not obtained admissions or statements in almost half of the cases that have been reported by our personnel, and we did require also a reporting procedure on this so that we could gather some statistics.

For those cases where no statement was obtained, in approximately one-third of those cases there was questioning for more than an hour but there was only one that went to the 3-hour limit.

Two-thirds of them involved questioning for less than an hour. In the cases where admissions or confessions were obtained, threefourths of those statements were obtained in 1 hour or less, frequently, very early in the contact with the officer. So we do have the opportunity under this administrative procedure to engage in some questioning of defendants after their arrest.

However, this is still relatively new. It has not been fully tested by the courts, so what I am reporting to you this morning, Mr. Chairman, are simply the results of our questioning procedure under that order that was issued September 30, 1965, over a 5-month period. The CHAIRMAN. Has this order been challenged in any place where you have used it?

Chief LAYTON. We do not have a court test of this yet, Mr. Chairman. Our cases, of course, are reviewed by the prosecutor and he would make some determination as to whether or not he had sufficient evidence without the confession so that we have not as yet had a court test on the procedure.

The CHAIRMAN. I assume that the prosecutor much prefers to rely on every other type of evidence that he has rather than a confession because of the uncertainty of its admissibility and the doubt that surrounds it.

Would this be correct?

Chief LAYTON. That is right.

The CHAIRMAN. He does not rely on the confession unless he absolutely has to. Is that correct?

Chief LAYTON. That is right. We have had some cases where it appeared in our discussions with the U.S. attorney that the confession under the guidelines and under the opinions that were then governing would probably be admissible but because of such evidence other than the confession the prosecutor decided not to use the confession.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well. You may proceed with your statement. Chief LAYTON. Since 1956, to cope with increasing crime and traffic accident trends, the personnel strength of the Metropolitan Police Department has been increased from 2,472 full-time and 76 part-time employees to the equivalent of 3,617 full-time and 150 part-time positions in fiscal year 1966.

And to our 1956 appropriation of approximately $16 million it has been necessary to add appropriations of more than $15 million to finance salary increases and increases in costs of retirement and other personnel benefits.

The CHAIRMAN. Do I understand that you are approximately 200 men short of your appropriated strength, which is 3,100.

Chief LAYTON. Yes: we have 195 vacancies in that authorized strength, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. What are your difficulties in filling those vacancies? Chief LAYTON. We have continued to have difficulties in not only filling positions, but our separations have continued at a rate that we have not been able to gain ground on the authorized strength that Congress allowed us last year.

We hired during calendar year 1965, my recollection is, about 297 men and we separated about 295, so for the year we had a net gain of 2 members in the Department.

We have advertised. I said to your committee last year, Mr. Chairman, that we planned to take steps to try to overcome our recruiting problems. We have done a number of things. We set up walk-in type examinations at the Civil Service Commission here locally on two Saturdays a month and later in the year we added to that one evening per month to make it possible for young men who were so inclined to take the examination without even filing for it prior to coming to the examining room.

We have advertised here in the District. We have sent recruiting teams outside the District, generally into the northeastern area of the country.

We have done a couple of things toward the end of the year, one of which I think has some promising results. We have set up an incentive-award system within the Department. This would give a member of the Department a $50 incentive award for recommending a successful candidate to the Department.

Our thinking on this was that our own personnel are the best salesmen for the Department, and we wanted to create an incentive for them to speak in this way.

Out of that particular program, my recollection is that we have had about 160 referrals by members of the Department. My recollection is that we have already made some 11 awards for men who have come through this program after they had been recommended by members of the Department.

There are approximately 25 under investigation, so that this is producing some men, but we have not been able to hire men in sufficient numbers or sufficiently fast to gain any ground on the authorized strength that Congress has allowed us.

I might say also, Mr. Chairman, that one other area that I feel has promise for us is our cadet program. We are asking in our 1967 budget for additional positions in the cadet rank. We feel that if we get young men who have just graduated from high school, get them into the Department, give them additional training, even college level training and they become acclimated to the Police Department, then we will be more likely to keep them.

The CHAIRMAN. Åre other cities of comparable size having the same difficulty?

Chief LAYTON. Yes, Mr. Chairman. This is not peculiar to the District of Columbia. All of the largest city departments are having problems in recruitment.

The CHAIRMAN. What can we do in Congress to be of more assistance to get more policemen?

Chief LAYTON. It is my feeling that one of the prospects that would be helpful would be an increase in pay which has been proposed and is looked on favorably by the Commissioners of the District and I am sure will be presented to Congress shortly. I think a higher level of pay would certainly assist in attracting men to police work and would be helpful in retaining them once they have joined the Police Department.

The CHAIRMAN. As you know, I have personally supported every salary increase that has come along, every attempt to better your requirement. I am convinced that one of the ways that we make some headway in this difficult fight on crime is by making the positions much more attractive for the officers in the Police Department.

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