A plan to relocate Baltimore’s police training academy to a state-of-the-art facility has a price tag of at least $330 million, The Baltimore Sun reported.
In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department moved its training facility to the University of Baltimore, where it has a five-year lease with annual rent roughly $1.4 million.
The Baltimore PD is under a 2017 consent decree with the Department of Justice to remedy constitutional violations. As part of that, the DOJ found the police department had deficient training infrastructure, including “outdated, ill-repaired” facilities. They relocated to the University of Baltimore to remedy that.
The DOJ said that relocation significantly upgraded its training spaces, but it also found ongoing issues with the shooting ranges, which it said would need to be remedied before it was in compliance with the consent decree.
Recently $450,000 in state money was used for an architectural firm to create a "preliminary design report" to relocate the training facility to Coppin State University, for an estimated $330 million, for a state-of-the-art facility.
Democratic state Sen. Antonio Hayes secured the $450,000 from the Maryland General Assembly for the study and acknowledged the estimated price tag is “a lot.”
He said that creating the facility would require the “political will of participating parties.” No funding sources have been identified, and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said that the initial study is “just beginning to be assessed.” He didn’t say whether the project would be a priority for his administration.
Police training is important and a community’s trust in their police is also important, but such a pricey facility shouldn’t be built just because an architectural firm drew it up.
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