Why Cities Cannot Hire Enough Police Officers, and What Would Fix It

Here is a help-wanted ad no city would ever run, and I offer it as a labelled hypothetical. "Wanted: adults of unimpeachable character to work nights, weekends and holidays, be assaulted occasionally, be second-guessed on video forever, pass a polygraph, a psychological screen and a physical test, and accept a pension tier that is worse than the one your predecessor got. Applicants should expect to be thanked rarely."

Now ask yourself why the line is not out the door. The people who run departments know the answer. The people who run cities know it too, and some of them have been quietly reversing course. The shortage of police officers is not an act of God. It is the sum of choices that governments, legislatures and the public made, and what was chosen can be unchosen. That is the whole of my argument, and it is a hopeful one.

The claim and the terms

My thesis: American police staffing problems come primarily from decisions about pay, pensions, working conditions, legal exposure and public respect, and cities that change those decisions can rebuild their departments.

Some definitions first.

Sworn officer means a person with legal authority to make arrests, as distinct from civilian staff such as dispatchers, records clerks and crime analysts.

Staffing can mean authorized strength (the number of positions the budget allows), actual strength (the number of officers on payroll) and available strength (officers who are not on leave, in training or on light duty). A department can have an authorized strength of a thousand, an actual strength of nine hundred and an available strength of seven hundred fifty, and the public experiences only the last number.

Attrition is departures: retirements, resignations, terminations and, in a different category, transfers to other agencies.

Pipeline is the path from application to solo patrol: application, background investigation, tests and screens, academy, field training, probation.

What the surveys reported, and what I will not claim

The best national source on this is the Police Executive Research Forum, or PERF, a policing research organization whose members are mostly police chiefs. Beginning in 2021, PERF surveyed its member agencies on workforce trends and published the results several times. The consistent pattern the surveys reported was that agencies saw increases in resignations and retirements after 2020 compared with before, and that many struggled to fill vacancies and to attract applicants. I am giving you the direction and not the numbers. The percentages were different in each survey, they depended on which agencies answered, and I will not reproduce a figure I cannot verify here. PERF itself cautioned that its first survey was not representative of the more than 18,000 departments in the country, and its later reports revised some figures and showed hiring recovering in some years. You can read the PERF reports on its website, and I encourage you to, because the details by agency size are instructive.

Two limits on that evidence deserve to be stated. First, PERF's surveys are of agencies that choose to respond, so they are not a random sample of all American police departments. Second, a survey of agencies tells you what happened, not why. For why, we have to reason from the mechanics of the job.

The pipeline, and where it leaks

A recruit does not become a patrol officer in a week, and every stage of the pipeline loses people.

1. Application. Many people start an application and do not finish. It is a long form, and the process is slow. A candidate who waits several months for the next step may take another job in the interval.
2. Background investigation. Investigators examine a candidate's history, employment, finances and associates. It takes time and eliminates many applicants, which is appropriate, because the department is vetting people who will carry guns and arrest others. But a department that takes six months to complete a background check is competing for the same young adult with an employer that took two weeks.
3. Testing and screening. Written exam, physical test, psychological evaluation, medical exam and often a polygraph. Each stage has a pass rate below one hundred percent.
4. The academy. Training lasts many weeks or months, and recruits are paid in most departments but are not yet doing the job. Some drop out, injure themselves or fail.
5. Field training and probation. A new officer rides with a training officer for weeks, then serves a probationary period in which he can be dismissed. Some leave on their own at this stage because the reality of the work differs from what they imagined.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Take a labelled hypothetical to show how it works. Suppose a department starts with one hundred applicants, and half survive the background investigation (fifty), and four-fifths of those pass testing (forty), and three-quarters of those complete the academy (thirty), and five-sixths of those complete field training and probation (twenty-five). One hundred applications yield twenty-five officers. If the department needs fifty new officers to replace its losses, it needs two hundred applicants. If applications fall by a quarter, it gets fewer than nineteen, and it falls further behind each year. That is how a shortage compounds: a small drop at the top of a long pipeline is a large drop at the bottom.

Why the front of the pipeline is thin

Why would fewer people apply? Here are the choices cities made, one by one.

Pay. A police officer's starting pay in many cities competes badly with private-sector jobs that do not involve danger or night shifts, and in a tight labor market the gap widens. Many departments cannot raise salaries without a city budget fight. When a suburb pays more than the central city, officers move to the suburb, which brings me to lateral hiring below.

Pensions. Public-safety pensions are the traditional compensation for a career in which the body wears out early. Over the decades many states and cities, facing pension shortfalls, created lower "tiers" for new hires, with higher retirement ages, lower benefits or longer vesting periods. That is a fiscal decision that can be defended on the books, and it has a human consequence: the recruit sees that the deal offered to him is worse than the deal his sergeant has. A conservative who cares about fiscal discipline should not pretend that unfunded pension promises can be ignored, but should also admit that a city which breaks its pension promises to new hires should not be surprised at the number of applicants.

Overtime and scheduling. Short staffing begets mandatory overtime, canceled days off and double shifts, which cause burnout and attrition, which cause more short staffing. It is a vicious circle, and breaking it requires hiring ahead of the losses, which budget offices dislike because it means paying for officers who are in the academy and not yet on the street.

Legal exposure. An officer works under a body of law that can end his career or bankrupt him for a split-second decision. The standard for judging the use of force, from Graham v. Connor, asks what a reasonable officer would have done in the circumstances, as I explain in Graham v. Connor and the Officer's View in a Split Second, and the doctrine of qualified immunity, which I examine in Qualified Immunity Explained, From the 1871 Klan Act to Today's Fights, limits civil liability in some cases. Fights over such protections, and state-level changes to them, shape how officers and recruits assess the risk of the job. I take no position here on every change, but a department should be able to tell a recruit plainly what his legal protections are, and a legislature that narrows them should be prepared for the effect on recruiting. Many cities indemnify their officers for judgments, which can be a significant protection in practice, and a department should tell applicants plainly whether its city does.

Public respect. This is the one that is hardest to measure and easiest to dismiss. People choose careers partly for the esteem in which others hold them. When elected officials describe police as an occupying force, when a municipal budget fight becomes a referendum on whether to have officers at all, and when a recruit expects to be filmed in his worst moment and condemned before the facts are known, some candidates choose another line of work. I cannot quantify the size of that effect, and I will not invent a figure, but I do not think anyone who has talked to recruiters doubts its direction. Rhetoric has consequences, and officials who talk about defunding a department should not be shocked when applicants take them at their word. I discuss the history of that slogan in Defund the Police Was a Slogan Cities Tried and Then Quietly Walked Back.

Lateral hiring and the poaching problem

Some departments solve their shortage by hiring trained officers from other departments. A lateral hire skips the academy or takes a shortened one, and he is productive sooner. Laterals are often attracted by a signing bonus, a higher salary or a better pension.

The consequence is a competition among neighbors. A well-paid suburb pulls officers from the city that trained them, and the city bears the cost of training and loses the benefit. Some departments have responded with training reimbursement agreements, requiring an officer who leaves within a set period to repay the cost. Others have tried to make themselves the better employer. The policy lesson is that lateral hiring moves officers around without adding to the total, so a state or a region with a shortage cannot solve it through poaching alone. It has to enlarge the pool of people entering policing, and that takes the choices I described.

One further complication: some states have rules to make it easier for officers to move between agencies while keeping their pension credit, and where such portability exists, departments are better able to compete. The question deserves a look at your own state's retirement system.

Residency rules

Another lever is the residency requirement: a rule that officers must live in the city they serve. The reasoning is attractive. An officer who lives in the community knows it, has a stake in it, and spends his pay there. The Supreme Court upheld a city's residency requirement for its firefighters, in McCarthy v. Philadelphia Civil Service Commission (1976), against a constitutional challenge, so cities have the legal ground to adopt them. But the rule narrows the applicant pool in a tight market, and in many places officers cannot afford to live where they work. Some states have limited cities' ability to impose residency rules by statute. A city that insists on residency while claiming it cannot hire enough officers has to choose which goal to put first, and I would suggest a preference for rules that favor residency without requiring it, such as housing assistance or a hiring preference for local candidates.

The counterargument: shrink and civilianize

Now the best opposing case. Some serious thinkers, not only the activists, argue that the answer to a shortage is not to hire more sworn officers but to ask police to do less. Officers spend a large share of their time on calls that do not require a gun and a badge: mental health crises, homeless encampments, minor traffic collisions, noise complaints, school disputes. Civilian responders, such as social workers, crisis counselors and traffic technicians, could handle many of those more cheaply, with better results, and free sworn officers for violent crime. In a time of tight labor markets, that argument says, a smaller, better-focused force is more realistic than trying to staff an overextended one.

I agree with a good part of it. There are tasks that do not need an armed officer. Departments across the country already use civilian staff for report-taking, evidence handling, crime analysis, parking and traffic duties, and many have set up crisis-response teams for mental health calls, and where those teams are well run they deserve support. A conservative should like any arrangement that gets a job done at lower cost by the right person, and should be wary of using a sworn officer, whose training is expensive, to do work a civilian can do.

Here is where the argument stops short.

One: civilianization works on the margin, not at the core. The calls that most need an officer are the ones involving violence, weapons and fleeing suspects, and no civilian program replaces that response. Someone has to answer the call when the caller says the man at the door has a gun.

Two: a smaller force is a reasonable aim only if the workload really falls. Moving a category of calls to civilians reduces the workload only if the civilians are funded and in place first. Many cities cut police budgets before building the alternative, and got neither.

Three: the evidence from economists suggests that police presence reduces crime. Researchers who have studied the effect of adding officers, using changes in city police numbers, have generally found that more officers are associated with less serious crime, particularly violent crime. I summarize what economists found when they counted officers and crimes in What Economists Found When They Counted Police Officers and Crimes, and the findings are not unanimous but lean in one direction. A policy to shrink a department must account for that.

Four: civilian programs also have to be staffed. The shortage of crisis counselors and social workers is real. Moving a task from a hard-to-fill job to another hard-to-fill job does not fix the staffing problem. It relocates it.

The right answer is to do both: civilianize the tasks that do not require a sworn officer, and rebuild the ranks of the officers who do.

What would fix it

Here is a plan a city council could adopt, in order of how directly it addresses the pipeline.

1. Pay competitively, and say so in the ad. Benchmark starting and midcareer pay against the regional labor market, not against last year's budget.
2. Shorten the pipeline. Set a target for the time from application to a conditional offer, and measure it. Allow the background investigation to run in parallel with testing where the law permits.
3. Pay for the academy, and hire ahead of attrition. Keep academy classes full every cycle, so that a retirement wave does not become a gap.
4. Honor the pension deal. If you must change tiers, do it openly and fund the system, so a recruit can trust the promise.
5. Support lateral movement with portability and with training reimbursement that is fair to both sides. The goal is a regional market that works.
6. Civilianize the right tasks. Move non-enforcement work to civilian staff, fund them first, and measure whether sworn hours are freed.
7. Explain legal protections plainly. Tell recruits what indemnification and immunity do and do not cover.
8. Show public support. This costs nothing. Elected officials who respect the work, and say so, make the job easier to fill. It is not a substitute for pay, but it is not trivial either.

For the practical side of getting a council to act on a list like this, see How to Get Your City Council to Fund Police Hiring Instead of Slogans.

A word on history

The federal government has tried to help, and the record is mixed. The 1994 crime bill, discussed in The 1994 Crime Bill, What It Actually Did and Who Wrote It, created a program of grants to help local agencies hire officers, which became the Community Oriented Policing Services office of the Justice Department. That program shows that federal money can help local hiring, and also that grants end, and a department that hires on a grant faces a cliff when it runs out. Federalism means that police departments belong to cities and counties, and the primary answer to local shortages is local choices. Washington can help at the margins.

The case in brief

1. Police staffing shortages are the result of choices about pay, pensions, scheduling, legal exposure and public respect, so they can be reversed by different choices.
2. PERF's workforce surveys after 2020 reported rising resignations and retirements and trouble filling vacancies, and the long pipeline from application to patrol means a small drop in applicants becomes a large drop in new officers.
3. Lateral hiring and residency rules move or limit officers but do not add to the total, so a region needs to enlarge the pool itself.
4. Civilianizing tasks that do not need a sworn officer is sensible, but it works at the margin, must be funded first, and does not replace officers who answer violent calls.
5. A city that pays competitively, shortens the pipeline, hires ahead of attrition, keeps its pension promises and honors the work can rebuild its force.

What you can do: ask your city's police department for its authorized, actual and available strength, and bring those three numbers, with the budget line for recruiting, to the next city council meeting.