Police staffing dips to lowest in decades
Small and mid-sized police departments are grappling with maintaining staffing levels that have, in some cases, dipped to their lowest lows in decades. All this happening in the midst of police week.
Big-city police departments such as Chicago’s are not the only jurisdictions facing hiring woes, as small- and mid-sized police departments, such as Missouri’s Independence Police Department are struggling to fill a record number of vacancies. Departments have, in some instances, reached some of the lowest staffing levels they’ve seen.
“Right now, we’re allocated 230 officers for our department for commissioned officers, and we are about 38 short,” Independence, Missouri Police Officer Jack Taylor, the agency’s public information officer said “I’ve been here 20-plus years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen where we’ve had that many officer vacancies.”
As a result, Independence Police Department has had to pull officers from other units in the department, such as investigations, community services and the traffic unit, to cover patrols, Taylor noted.
Officers from the patrol unit are “the ones that go answer 911 calls and calls for service from citizens,” he explained. “We have to make sure that that’s adequately staffed, and we don’t have those people.
“The other units in the department tend to suffer because of that,” he added. “It kind of trickles down to the community not getting the type of service that we’d like to provide.”
As a result of officers being moved to the patrol unit, Taylor said, “there’s less detectives there to investigate your case. Your case is going to take a little bit longer to get assigned to a detective,” He added that “There’s less traffic officers. There’s less accident investigators responding to an accident.”
Taylor said he believed the issues his department is facing extend “nationwide.”
“Officers really haven’t been portrayed in the best light here lately,” Taylor said. “Even within the last couple of years, officers every day run the risk of being indicted, being sued, being killed – sometimes all three in the same call. I think people look at it and go, ‘Do I really want to get into that mess?'”
DeCarlo, a criminal justice professor for the University of New Haven’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences said the police-to-citizen ratio has not been “keeping pace with the increase in population.”
Taking a wide lens to police departments nationwide, only about 17 police departments cover jurisdictions with populations of more than one million people. The southeast boasts the highest number of police officers, specifically Kansas, Oklahoma, north Texas and North Carolina. And while the number of police officers has increased minimally over the past year, so has the population, according to DeCarlo.
Betsy Brantner Smith, a 29-year police veteran, said adequately staffing police departments nationwide has been “a big issue,” especially in departments that don’t boast the same manpower numbers as those in major cities. “I don’t think most people know this: Most police departments are under 20 officers,” Brantner Smith noted. “Most police departments are not these ginormous agencies. And it’s already tough to attract people to those small departments,” she added. “Then, you introduce [the] defund the police [movement] and vilification of police, and it makes it very difficult.”
Difficulties in recruitment can sometimes lead to a police departments hiring less qualified candidates, she noted. But smaller police departments often have one advantage, she added. Many police officers employed by big cities are now considering whether “they want to leave and go somewhere where they’re more appreciated.”
“What smaller departments need to do right now is … to get the word out that they’re hiring, and that they want to attract these big city candidates,” she said. “The problem is, is that takes money.”