More than 70% of Los Angeles Police Department employees are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the city’s chief of police.
During Tuesday’s Police Commission meeting, Chief Michel Moore said that exactly 71% of the department’s civilian and sworn employees reported they got both shots. A larger number of employees have gotten one shot, though he didn’t say precisely what that number was.
The department’s vaccination rate has climbed rapidly over the last two months. Police officers had access to COVID-19 shots starting in January, yet LAPD’s vaccination numbers for much of the year appeared to be low — by August, LAPD said only around 46% of employees were fully vaccinated.
But after the City Council passed one of the most stringent vaccination mandates in the country for employees, with no option for weekly testing for those who refused, LAPD began verifying its employees’ status. The result was a 25% increase in employees confirming they had gotten vaccinated.
That still leaves potentially thousands of vaccine holdouts within LAPD. Around 3,000 employees in September filed their intent to apply for religious and medical exemptions to the mandate, by far the most of any city department.
Rules for those holdouts became more clear Tuesday after City Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo, after months of bargaining with city employee unions, submitted a final plan to the City Council for how the vaccine mandate would be enforced.
Employees now will have until December to get vaccinated. But employees who see their religious or medical exemptions to the mandate approved would still have to submit to weekly testing, and they’ll have to pay for the tests. That money will come straight out of their paychecks.
If any employees who resign or are fired want their jobs back, they’d be eligible so long as they get vaccinated, according to the plan.
Whether any of the thousands of LAPD employees who said they intend to file exemptions will follow through will become more clear this week. Szabo’s plan includes a path for those employees to start actually the application process to be exempted from the mandate.
According to Szabo, the exemptions must be for verifiable religious beliefs or medical issues.
“Personal, political, or philosophical objections to a COVID-19 vaccine are legally insufficient justification for granting an exemption to the COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement,” he wrote.
Moore on Tuesday said he didn’t yet what would happen with those LAPD employees who might file for exemptions. Some departments within LAPD had a higher rate of employees filing their intent to be exempted than others: In the dispatch and communications center alone, that meant around 70 employees.
“Whether they’ll follow through with that, I don’t have that information,” he said.
