Boston's Largest Police Union Says It Answered 308 Calls in 24 Hours and Needs More Officers. Replies to Its Post Asked Why It Endorsed Wu and Healey

The Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, the city's largest police union, posted on X on Saturday that it is "tired of being understaffed" and that the city needs more officers, citing its own count of calls answered in a single day, Mass Daily News reported.

"We're tired of being understaffed and being asked to do more with less. Our officers and those we serve deserve better," the union wrote, according to the post as quoted by Mass Daily News. "Despite the understaffing, our dedicated officers continue to answer the call. In fact, our officers responded to 308 calls in a 24-hour period ending at 10AM on Friday which included five robberies, six aggravated assaults, two residential burglaries, one theft from a vehicle and 9 instances of miscellaneous larceny. We need more cops."

The call figures are the union's own count. The Boston Police Department has not, in the reporting cited, confirmed or disputed them.

Many of the replies to the post focused not on the staffing claim but on the union's political endorsements, according to Mass Daily News. "You backed Wu and Healey. Think about that. Keep backing them and this will continue," one user wrote. "Michelle Wu hates you guys, but you continue to endorse her, which is wild," wrote another. A third asked: "You endorsed Maura Healey, how am I now supposed to care?"

Replies on a social media post are not a survey of voters, officers or union members, and the identities of the people writing them are not established.

The endorsements are a matter of record. The union, led by president Larry Calderone, endorsed Wu for reelection in February 2025 at its Dorchester headquarters, which union officials said was the first time in 30 years the union had backed a sitting mayor for reelection, according to Mass Daily News. "She leads by example. She loves her police officers and she shows it," Calderone said at the time. In September, the union was one of four police unions that endorsed Healey's reelection the same day, the outlet reported, with Calderone saying, "She has always been available for law enforcement."

Calderone has defended the mayor before while the union raised staffing alarms. In July, after a mob attacked a lone Boston officer in Dorchester, he defended Wu and blamed the City Council, and days later he told CBS Boston the city had "approximately 1640 police officers answering 911 calls," according to Mass Daily News.

The staffing complaint is not new. In July 2022, the union denounced the department's decision to order more than 120 officers onto long overtime shifts during a weekend that included a Red Sox game, a Seaport festival and an Open Streets event in Jamaica Plain, with some officers working 24 hours straight, Boston.com reported. "The BPPA has been calling on the City to hire more cops for years," Calderone said in a statement then.

City figures discussed at past City Council hearings frame the dispute. The department employs just over 2,000 officers, short of the 2,500 called for in city law, and after accounting for officers on leave, in the academy or otherwise unavailable, fewer than 1,700 were ready for deployment, according to a Police1 report on a council hearing. Police officials told the council at that time that the department had nearly 550 unfilled positions, more than 250 of them for sworn officers, and that an average of 108 officers had joined each year over three years against an average of 131 leaving, Police1 reported. Those figures are from that hearing and may not reflect current staffing.

The department's overtime spending has also drawn scrutiny. The same report said the department spent more than $77 million on overtime through the first three quarters of a recent fiscal year and was on pace to top $100 million. "If you hire more cops, you can cut police OT," Calderone said at that hearing.

City leaders have pushed back on the link between officer numbers and violence. After a Hyde Park mass shooting in which one person was killed and four injured, the union posted that violence was "officially out of control," while Wu and Commissioner Michael Cox defended staffing levels and pointed to a recruiting class of more than 100 officers, according to a report syndicated by the Hanford Sentinel. Cox said there was no correlation between the uptick in violence and the number of officers on the street.

Whether Boston is understaffed depends on the benchmark used: the 2,500 figure in city law, the number of officers available for patrol, or the volume of overtime. The union's post did not name a target number, and neither the mayor's office nor the department responded publicly to the post in the reporting cited. The union's endorsements of Wu and Healey stand; Healey faces Republican Mike Minogue in Tuesday's election.