Some police officers are leaving big cities and moving to smaller towns to avoid increased scrutiny • Alabama Reflector

This story originally appeared on Stateline.

Four years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd, many police departments in major cities are struggling to fill their ranks.

Agencies have tried offering hiring bonuses, speeding up background checks and increasing salaries. Some have lifted bans on visible tattoos, lowered physical fitness test requirements and expanded eligibility requirements to include noncitizens. But hiring is not enough, the data shows. Some law enforcement agencies have no shortage of officers but need other key staff, such as crime analysts and victim advocates.

The cause of the staffing shortage is unclear. The pandemic has disrupted employment in many industries, and a recent Duke University study suggests that the Floyd-related protests of 2020 did not significantly reduce the number of police officers. But some experts say the national reckoning of law enforcement has had an impact.

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

With larger agencies that typically serve more densely populated communities, more and more officers are moving to smaller towns, often to escape the intense surveillance that exists in big cities, Wexler said.

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

In the group’s survey, small and midsize departments reported more sworn officers than they had in January 2020. However, large departments still have more than 5% fewer staff than they did then, even though the number of officers increased from 2022 to 2023 compared to the previous year.

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

However, the estimated number of employed civil servants experienced both slight increases and decreases over the same period. In 2023, the estimated number of employed civil servants decreased for the second consecutive year, from 655,890 in 2022 to 646,310 in 2023.

But the agency’s statistics do not track hiring or firing and include many non-sworn employees at local agencies and many federal agencies. In addition, the data do not indicate how many officers are transferred from one department to another.

A turning point?

Lack of interest in the police profession, the Covid-19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police have contributed to the police shortage across the country, Wexler said.

Although the organization already noted a decline 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 activism following Floyd’s death in May 2020 probably did not lead to officers leaving the profession. Grunwald examined employment data from nearly 7,000 local law enforcement agencies and found that the surge in layoffs at those agencies after the summer of 2020 was “smaller, later, less sudden, and perhaps less pervasive than the retention crisis narrative suggests.”

The impact on the overall police force workforce by the end of 2021 was only 1 percent, according to Grunwald’s findings. However, Grunwald also noted that some larger departments lost more than 5 percent of their personnel by the end of 2021.

Many larger agencies have increased the salaries of their officers or offered incentives such as signing bonuses to attract new employees and retain existing officers. Nevertheless, agencies across the country are in competition with one another.

Some of the larger departments with the highest salaries are struggling.

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

The department’s recruitment website states that the starting salary for those still in the academy is about $88,000 and for a full-time police officer it is $97,000.

The city’s budget was passed and reportedly comes very close to the proposed plan, but details were not available. According to the proposal, the budget would provide authorization for a police force of up to 9,084 officers, but not all of the funding. The funding would cover a sworn workforce of 8,908 officers. Last year, Democratic Mayor Karen Bass called for increasing the LAPD to about 9,500 officers.

In Oregon, the Portland Police Bureau is trying to fill 61 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 agency spokesman Sergeant Kevin Allen. The bureau’s recruiting website lists a starting salary of $82,000 and a $5,000 bonus.

“It’s not about the money”

However, Wexler said applicants wanted more than just a high salary.

“It’s not about the money. It’s about the quality of life in this particular department,” he said. “There are large departments on the West Coast that pay six figures … and yet they can barely hire police officers.”

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

“There are a number of cities that have raised salaries or given big bonuses. Those things are more cosmetic and don’t last long with people,” Butler said in an interview with Stateline. “When you get a $15,000 to $20,000 bonus but work in an incredibly unhealthy, toxic culture, it starts to take a toll and has a big impact on a person’s soul and psyche.”

Instead of focusing on hiring incentives, Butler said, police departments should change their culture “in a way that appears to be adding greater value to the community.”

“That alone would be a huge magnet, a huge draw for people, especially the younger generations,” Butler said.

Police Chief Booker Hodges, who currently serves in Bloomington, Minnesota, a city of about 87,000 people, said he has seen how changing the culture within a department can improve hiring rates.

He said he has worked in previous departments that were understaffed when he took office and managed to bring them back to full strength by fostering greater purpose and building stronger community relationships. Hodges implemented the 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 look for something meaningful and see an agency with a purpose, they see us,” Hodges said in an interview with Stateline. “That’s helped us attract and retain officers.”

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