The national atmosphere around policing has shifted significantly in the years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May of 2020 — including increased public trust in police and political support on both sides of the aisle.
But across the country police departments are still struggling with recruitment efforts, clearance rates, and establishing a sense of public safety for communities, Governing reports.
In 2020, protests against police brutality and racial discrimination sprung up all across the nation and indeed much of the world, and anti-police feeling ran strong in many places.
More recently, though, a spike in homicides and other violent crimes during the pandemic put a new focus on public safety. The slogan "defund the police" quickly proved politically toxic, blamed by many Democrats for some of the party’s losses in recent elections. Policies meant to curb the worst excesses of police activity, including bans on chokeholds and restrictions on qualified immunity from civil litigation, now are mostly dead letters.
Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the Justice Department ordered a halt to consent decrees and settlement agreements that required changes in policy in departments with patterns of misconduct. In March, President Trump called for the death penalty for anyone who kills a cop.
But even if police departments are facing less criticism and enjoying strong political support, that doesn’t mean their challenges are all behind them.
The most glaring problem is staffing. Despite its recruiting efforts, Seattle remains short by about 300 officers. Minneapolis has a vacancy rate of about 20 percent. Across the country, agencies are about 10 percent short of their budgeted workforce, according to a survey from the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
“We have gone from a period when there was some talk about defunding the police to where police departments have the money but they cannot hire,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit policy group.
Agencies are also looking for areas where civilians can take the place of sworn officers, such as monitoring surveillance footage. And while an older generation of cops was trained to assume every call would take them to an active crime scene, younger recruits more often understand that they’ll work as de facto social workers, the go-to responders for people falling through gaps in social safety nets.
A broader trend has been co-responder programs, which involve sending social workers or mental health specialists alongside sworn officers to respond to certain nonviolent incidents.
Meanwhile, the percentage of crimes that are solved — the so-called clearance rate — is anemic. More than half of murders and manslaughters were solved in 2022, but only about a quarter of rapes and robberies get resolved. That’s among crimes that are reported to police, which is less than half of the crimes that are actually committed.
And establishing public trust is a long-term process; losing it can happen in a flash. There are still instances where officers turn anodyne encounters into something dangerous — ultimately shooting individuals, for instance, who were initially stopped for a speeding violation. Police fatally shot a record number of people last year. A group called Mapping Police Violence found that officers have killed more people each year since 2019. Racial disparities remain stark. The share of Black people confronted or threatened with force actually increased from 2020 to 2022, the period of peak scrutiny following the murder of George Floyd.
Although many departments have instituted accountability measures including civilian review boards, what people care about most is police's effectiveness, Moskos says. “Do people feel safe when people leave the house?” he asks. “If they do, then the public in general is willing to cut police a lot of slack — perhaps too much slack in certain cases. But the focus has to be on preventing crime and violence and disorder.”