Some police officers leave big cities for smaller towns to avoid heightened scrutiny

Four years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd, many big-city law enforcement agencies are struggling to fill their ranks.

Amanda Hernández | (TNS) Stateline.org

Four years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd, many big-city law enforcement agencies are struggling to fill their ranks.

Departments have tried offering hiring bonuses, expediting background checks and increasing salaries. Some have dropped bans on visible tattoos, lowered physical fitness exam requirements and expanded eligibility to noncitizens. Yet the hiring that has happened is not enough, data shows. Some law enforcement agencies don’t face a shortage of officers but need other key personnel, such as crime analysts and victim advocates.

The cause of the shortages is unclear; the pandemic shuffled the employment picture in many industries, and a recent Duke University study suggests the Floyd-related protests of 2020 didn’t significantly reduce police ranks. But some experts say law enforcement’s national reckoning had an effect.

“We are definitely in uncharted territory when it comes to the future employment of police officers,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national nonprofit think tank on policing standards.

Larger agencies, which usually serve more densely populated communities, are seeing more officers move to smaller places, often to escape the intense scrutiny found in big cities, Wexler said.

Some of the job incentives are working, especially in smaller agencies. More sworn officers were hired in 2023 than in any of the previous four years, and fewer officers overall resigned or retired, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, which included responses from 214 law enforcement agencies.

In the group’s survey, small and medium-size departments reported more sworn officers than they did in January 2020. But large departments remain more than 5% below their staffing levels from that time, despite a year-over-year increase in officers from 2022 to 2023.

Federal estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the median annual salary for police and sheriff’s officers has increased by about 14% over the past four years, from $63,150 in 2019 to $72,280 in 2023.

The estimated number of employed officers, however, has seen both slight increases and decreases throughout the same period. In 2023, the estimated number of employed officers decreased for the second consecutive year, from 655,890 in 2022 to 646,310 in 2023.

However, the bureau’s statistics do not measure hiring or separation, and they include many non-sworn employees at local agencies and many federal agencies. Additionally, the data does not measure how many officers are transferring from one department to another.

A turning point?

Lack of interest in the policing profession, the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers have all contributed to officer shortages across the country, Wexler said.

Although the organization first noticed a dip in employment in 2019, “2020 was a real turning point,” Wexler said.

But not everyone agrees with that assessment. A non-peer-reviewed study published in June by Ben Grunwald, a law professor at Duke University, suggests that the activism following Floyd’s death in May 2020 likely did not cause officers to leave the profession. Grunwald studied employment data from nearly 7,000 local law enforcement agencies and found that the increase in separations at those agencies after the summer of 2020 “was smaller, later, less sudden, and possibly less pervasive than the retention-crisis narrative suggests.”

The impact on the total police labor force by the end of 2021 was just 1%, according to Grunwald’s findings. But Grunwald also found that some larger departments lost more than 5% of their staff by the end of 2021.

Many larger departments have increased officer pay or offered incentives such as signing bonuses to attract new hires and retain current officers, but departments nationwide are competing with one another.

Some of the highest-paying large departments are struggling.

The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, has been dealing with a shortage of officers since 2020 and has not met its hiring goals for several years, according to Officer Norma Eisenman, a department spokesperson. The department currently employs 8,200 officers but has 470 vacancies.

The department advertises a starting salary of about $88,000 for people still in the academy and $97,000 for a full-time police officer, according to its recruitment website.

The city’s budget passed and reportedly is close to the proposed plan, but details weren’t available. Under the proposal, the budget would provide authorization, but not all of the funding, for a force of up to 9,084 officers. The funding would cover a sworn workforce of 8,908 officers. Last year, Democratic Mayor Karen Bass called for an expansion of the LAPD to about 9,500 officers.

In Oregon, the Portland Police Bureau is working to fill 61 officer vacancies. The bureau currently employs 605 officers and has hired 40 officers this year, halfway to its annual hiring goal of 80 officers, according to department spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Allen. The bureau’s recruitment website advertises an $82,000 starting salary and a $5,000 bonus.

‘It isn’t about the money’

Wexler, though, said job candidates want more than just high salaries.

“It isn’t about the money. It is about the quality of life in that particular department,” he said. “You have large departments on the West Coast that are paying six figures … that are still hard-pressed to hire police officers.”

Mike Butler, a retired public safety chief who oversaw the police and fire departments in Longmont, Colorado, for 26 years, echoed Wexler’s point.

“There are a number of cities that have raised the ante on their salaries or given big bonuses. Those things are kind of cosmetic and short-lived with people,” Butler said in an interview with Stateline. “If you get a $15,000-$20,000 bonus but you’re working in an incredibly unhealthy, toxic culture, that begins to show and has great wear and tear on a person’s soul and psyche.”

Instead of focusing on hiring incentives, what police departments should do, Butler argues, is shift their cultures “in a way that suggests that it’s adding greater value to a community.”

“That, in and of itself, would be a huge magnet, a huge draw for people, especially younger generations,” Butler said.

Police Chief Booker Hodges, who now serves Bloomington, Minnesota, a city with roughly 87,000 residents, said he has seen how changing an agency’s work culture can improve hiring.

Working in previous departments that were short-staffed when he arrived, he said, he managed to bring them to full strength by promoting a greater sense of purpose and building stronger community relationships. Hodges implemented this same strategy at the Bloomington Police Department, where he has been chief for about two years.

The department has been fully staffed for the past 18 months and overstaffed for the past six months, he said.

“When people are looking for something purposeful, and they see an agency with a purpose, they see us,” Hodges said in an interview with Stateline. “That has helped us attract and retain officers.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

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