An attempt by the Harford County sheriff's office to have state and municipal law enforcement agencies pay a "fair share" of the cost of operating the Interagency Processing Center suffered a setback when state police opted to stop using the county's central booking facility on Feb. 1.
State troopers from the Bel Air and John F. Kennedy barracks stopped using the center, which is in the Harford County sheriff's office, at 45 S. Main St. in Bel Air, rather than agree to supply one trooper a day for six days a week to assist with processing duties there.
"It was strictly a manpower problem for us," said Maj. Randy Holt, area commander for the Maryland State Police.
He said troopers from the Bel Air or JFK barracks had been working eight-hour shifts about four days a month at the processing center to help out.
Filling six shifts a week would have meant losing the services of the equivalent of 1 1/2 troopers a year, Major Holt said. "It's a hardship. We just don't have the manpower," he said.
Elsewhere in the state, Major Holt said, prisoners are booked at the barracks, as was done at the JFK and Bel Air barracks before the processing center opened.
Now, troopers will take prisoners to a District Court commissioner in Bel Air for a bail hearing, Major Holt said. Instead of taking prisoners to the processing center, the troopers will have to wait in line for the commissioner, he said.
Sheriff Joseph P. Meadows, who vowed throughout his election campaign last fall that he would get more deputies out of the office and back on road patrol, wanted state police to provide additional help at the center based on the percentage of prisoners they brought to the facility in 1994.
Capt. James Carter of the sheriff's office said a formula -- involving the number of work hours needed to staff the processing center 24 hours a day and the number of prisoners each agency booked there -- was used to determine each agency's percentage of use.
In 1994, 4,167 prisoners were processed at the center, Captain Carter said. State troopers from the Bel Air barracks brought in about 12 percent of them.
"We determined that a fair share for state police would be 48 man-hours, or six eight-hour shifts, per week," he said.
Captain Carter said the sheriff's office also determined that six additional shifts -- three by the Aberdeen Police Department, two by the Havre de Grace Police Department and one by the Bel Air Police Department -- would constitute fair shares of support at the center by those municipal agencies.
Losing the assistance of state troopers at the processing center won't have a serious negative impact on the scheduling of personnel within the sheriff's office, Captain Carter said.
"With fewer prisoners to book, perhaps we'll be able to get the job done with one less deputy from time to time," he said.
Captain Carter said slack periods cannot always be determined ahead of time.
"There's no slow day of the week, or time of day, for prisoners coming through the IPC," he said.
The processing center will be moved to the Harford County Detention Center when an addition there is completed in about two years.