Understaffed Police Depts look to lower standards to hire cops - they should raise them
Police departments across the country are severely understaffed. According to The Washington Post
The San Francisco Police Department is down more than 600 officers, almost 30 percent of its allotment. Phoenix needs about 500 more officers to be fully staffed. The D.C. police force is smaller than it has been in 50 years, despite troubling gun violence and carjackings, as officers leave faster than they can be replaced.
When a profession is understaffed it is for one of three reasons. It requires skills that not enough job applicants have — for instance, high-tech. The pay is not high enough. Or there are just not enough workers to fill the demand. Which one(s) of these is the cause of police shortages?
Police work is not technically demanding, and plenty of Americans have the skills to be cops. The job requires (or should require) well-adjusted, mentally healthy individuals with minimum physical fitness. However, the job does not need the knowledge, and analytic and calculating skills needed to work in law, medicine, engineering, finance, aviation, education, etc. It also does not need the skills and knowledge that an electrician, plumber, carpenter, or other skilled tradesperson possesses.
My initial guess was that pay was the main reason. However, it is unlikely that is the case. Take the SFPD. The annual starting salary for a San Franciso Police Officer is $103,116 + OT and benefits. In seven years, that could reach $147,628. After 30 tears on the job (which could be at age 51), a retired cop is entitled to as much as 90% of their last year's salary — amounting to $132,865 annually, plus retiree healthcare.
Most police departments do not pay that well. However, in most states, the average cop salary is greater than the average salary for all workers. And the job comes with benefits that most jobs no longer pay. The financial reward of being a cop is even more lucrative when you consider that most cop jobs do not require any college education — including those in San Francisco.
The reason appears to be that people do not want to be cops. Why? They perceive it to be a dangerous job. After all, you are dealing with armed criminals and people inflamed by domestic disputes, alcohol, drugs, and mental illness. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), 226 federal, state, county, municipal, military, tribal, and campus officers died in the line of duty in 2022.
However, as grim as that statistic is, it leaves policing as the 22nd most dangerous job (by fatality rate) in the US — right behind ground maintenance. And far behind the top three — logging, aviation (think small planes & helicopters), and oil, gas & mining derrick operation.
More important than the false perception of danger is the reputation of police officers — especially since the worldwide shock at the over eight-minute murder of George Floyd by the cop Derek Chauvin as three other officers on the scene did nothing to stop it.
Floyd is just one of a series of high-profile killings of unarmed Americans. In 2022, cops killed 1,197 of their fellow Americans — 26% of whom were Black, double their percent (13%) of the population. Worse, in 98.1% of these killings from 2013 to 2022, prosecutors did not charge the officer involved with a crime. And among the few they did, 75% escaped conviction. In other words, for every 1,000 killings, a cop was convicted of a crime in five.
The police have mainly themselves to blame for their low esteem. There is no database of bad cops. Police forces in one jurisdiction hire cops fired by another. Many departments have no civilian oversight. Police unions usually support cops no matter how defective. And few people in law enforcement seem resolved to enforce professional ethics or weed out bad cops.
So what is the answer? Obviously, cops must do a better job of policing themselves. And if they cannot, others should. And police unions need to shed their reflexive desire to protect every one of their own regardless of the circumstances. I suspect rank-and-file officers would be generally supportive. Few of us like working with bums that make everyone else look bad. (Perhaps I am too optimistic)
In the WaPo article, the author, Robert Klemko, points to a disturbing possibility. In the face of many job openings and few applicants, he writes that the disparity is leading some police agencies “to make the risky move of lowering the bar for hiring to fill their ranks.” They should not. It will make the situation worse. A temporary gain in new bad cops will lead to fewer good people applying in the long run.
Instead, police departments should recruit from the best students in high school — say the top 30%. And to incentivize these quality individuals, PDs should subsidize a college education in return for a minimum number of years of service. They could restrict it to the cost of in-state tuition at a public university — which in most cases, is less than $10,000 a year.
Think of it like a GI Bill. It would improve the quality of applicants and reduce the number of open positions.
People will claim it is not fair — that equally worthy state employees, e.g. teachers, should have the same benefit. Fair enough, that is something the authorities will have to figure out.
Others will say that states on tight budgets have no spare cash. They are wrong. Because police departments are not paying for officers in unfilled positions, that money is available. Furthermore, as good people fill open positions, police departments will pay less time-and-a-half overtime. And there would be a reduction in the millions paid out by municipalities to settle excessive force claims.
Policing experts have lists of recommended actions for improving policing. These measures include non-police specialists dealing with mentally disturbed individuals, changing training to focus more on de-escalation and interpersonal skills, improving professional development and career-long education, and more rigorous psychological profiling to weed out racists and sociopaths.
All of these would be easier to achieve with new cops better educated to accept change and instruction - and less likely to retreat to us vs. them defensiveness. A great country needs great cops - not a bunch of cop apologists. Or police departments hiring whatever psychos walk through the door.