Police departments across America are seeking to overcome a sudden decline in applications. They are also dealing with a mass exodus of disgruntled officers.
Police departments are trying to woo new recruits with the tactics typically a football coach would use to snatch a prized quarterback.
In the suburbs of Washington, D.C. in Fairfax County, Va., future officers are being treated to a “signing day” ceremony where they formally accept their job offers.
Out-of-state residents who want to join the police force in Louisville, Ky., are being flown in to take entrance tests, put up in a hotel, and paired with an officer for a ride-along.
Agencies on the West Coast are offering bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars to lure officers from other departments to transfer. The economics of law enforcement were long tilted in favor of police departments, which often had far more qualified applicants than they did job openings.
This is no longer the case.
There has been a steep drop in the number of people wanting to become police officers since the start of the Covid pandemic. That, combined with the unrest of 2020 and mass international police protests, has given extraordinary leverage to job seekers, forcing departments to market themselves in new ways.
After a police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020, there have been calls across the nation to radically revamp policing and divert resources to other agencies. But those calls have cooled since then.
Despite this, police chiefs say they are still contending with the fallout from those months.
At a recent conference in Washington held by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy organization, officials from departments across the country said they were struggling.
They said they were not finding enough people willing and able to fight crime, staff unfilled shifts and building residents’ trust in the police.
Many officers left feeling unappreciated by both politicians and residents, especially at a time when “Defund the Police” became a staple of political discourse and protest.
Some of the departing officers accepted signing bonuses to join departments in the suburbs; others fled the profession entirely. Though Seattle now offers a $30,000 bonus of its own for officers serving elsewhere who transfer to the city, as well as a $7,500 signing bonus for new recruits, Chief Diaz said recruiting is still proving difficult. New police officers in Seattle earn about $83,000 annually once they graduate from the academy, while experienced officers transferring earn more than $90,000 a year to start.
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