The Miami Police Department has had 809 applicants on a police officer recruitment list this year. A decade ago, they would’ve had that many applicants on the first day.
Law enforcement — along with many other fields in the public sector — has struggled to hire enough staff. While 2023 saw staffing increases after years of decline, police departments continue to see shortages in critical areas.
For many young Americans, becoming a police officer is no longer an appealing career path, reports Governing. They may shy away for a variety of reasons.
For some, the image of police has taken a hit due to high-profile shootings. Others express financial concerns, while many young people have expectations that law enforcement cannot meet, such as remote work. “The risk associated with being a police officer outweighs the benefits," says Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum, at least for some people when other jobs can offer comparable pay for far less risk.
Although small and medium-sized departments are rebounding, big cities struggle, Wexler says. Seattle has been able to hire only half as many people as the number of officers who have retired this year. In Los Angeles, a city with a historically understaffed police department, Chief Dominic Choi has just under 9,000 officers, leaving him 25 percent short of the 12,000 needed to be “well-staffed."
“I think it has made it more difficult to respond to all types of calls,” Choi said. “Where we’re seeing some slippages are nonemergency calls. We’ve seen that number go from an average response time of 20 minutes upwards to 40 minutes, up to an hour.”
The law enforcement workforce shortage is not new but shortages became a bigger problem in 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak and the anti-police protests up after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. "It's impossible to disentangle those two things," says Ben Grunwald, author of A Large-Scale Study of the Police Retention Crisis.
COVID-19 reshaped the landscape of policing. The pandemic triggered, or at least coincided with, a spike in homicides and other crimes. Grunwald notes that officers were not only constantly exposed to people with the virus, but to “a new population of people that were more difficult to deal with on a regular basis," due to shifting attitudes toward police and the rise in behavioral health challenges.
What might once have been an attractive career option, offering solid pay and benefits, has become less appealing, says Jack McDevitt, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University. “People don’t see themselves as wanting to be police officers,” he says.
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