The Long Beach Police Department will no longer station officers on Metro trains and platforms throughout the city, ending a five-year agreement with the transit agency to secure its local facilities.

The LBPD has handled policing on the Long Beach portion of the A Line since 2017, but the department says will not renew its contract with Metro after it expires at the end of December.

Instead, the nine officers, two sergeants and one lieutenant currently watching over the A Line will be reassigned to cover “critical vacancies” in the LBPD’s patrol division, according to an unsigned statement from the department.

Officers will still respond to Metro property if needed, but, “Once the contract is expired, we will no longer have LBPD officers on trains and stations, unless dispatched for emergency calls for service,” the statement said.

The move comes as the LBPD has struggled to fill its ranks. As of July, there were 155 open positions — about one in five officers.

With staff stretched thin, officers on average are taking 20 minutes longer than they were three years ago to respond to all but the most serious crimes, according to data analyzed by the Long Beach Post.

The LBPD said it decided to pull officers from trains “after significant deliberation and analysis of crime statistics, staffing considerations, and contractual obligations.”

The Metro board of directors, which has questioned whether it was getting its money’s worth from contracts with the LBPD, LAPD and Sheriff’s Department, has already moved to create its own police agency, but that will be a yearslong process nowhere near complete by the time Long Beach officers are reassigned.

It’s not clear what Metro will do in the meantime. The agency can extend its contract with LBPD on a month-to-month basis but only until March.

Metro spokesman Jose Ubaldo said in an email that the agency “will continue to work closely with the Long Beach Police Department to ensure the safety of our stations and customers in alignment with our other law enforcement resources.”

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department patroled the A Line before Long Beach police took over the contract in 2017.

Jeremiah Dobruck is executive editor of the Long Beach Post where he oversees all day-to-day newsroom operations. In his time working as a journalist in Long Beach, he’s won numerous awards for his investigative reporting and editing. Before coming to the Post in 2018, he wrote for publications including the Press-Telegram, Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. Reach him at [email protected] or @jeremiahdobruck on Twitter.