George Floyd protests did not lead to a mass exodus of police officers

Did the 2020 social justice protests lead to a wave of police officers leaving the force? A recent study suggests the truth may not be so simple.

In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by pinning him to the ground with his knee. When a video of the encounter circulated online, the image of a white police officer casually kneeling on a black man until he suffocated ignited a powder keg: Americans, who had been crazy about staying at home during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, took to the streets to protest police brutality, in some cases violently.

The conventional wisdom is that, faced with a nationwide spike in crime and mounting protests with demonstrators proclaiming that “all cops are scumbags,” many police officers have simply given in. “As anger simmers in parts of the country, some U.S. police departments are facing their own crises, and some officers have now chosen to leave the service,” CNN reported in June 2020, less than a month after Floyd’s death.

“Law enforcement agencies are reeling from a year that began with a global pandemic and is now experiencing significant social upheaval,” Police1 reported in October 2020. “In just a few months, civil servants went from being praised as essential workers to working amid a societal discourse that portrays all civil servants in a negative light.”

A June 2021 survey by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found a 45 percent increase in retirements in 2020-2021 compared to the previous year, as well as an 18 percent increase in resignations.

But a new study by Duke University law professor Ben Grunwald challenges that narrative. To test the validity of the claim that police officers quit en masse after the 2020 protests, Grunwald collected data “on every job held by every police officer in all 6,800 local law enforcement agencies in 15 states, which together cover half the U.S. population.” That database included over 972,000 police officers between the mid-1990s and 2022, although he only focused on the years 2011-2021 for the study.

Grunwald noted that “the increase in layoffs” at these agencies “after the summer of 2020 was smaller, later, less sudden, and perhaps less pervasive than the retention crisis narrative suggests.”

“Separations remained nearly stable in 2020 compared to the previous year,” he writes, while “in 2021, separations did increase at historically high rates, but by significantly less than the most commonly reported numbers for that period.” Specifically, separations increased “less than 1% in 2020 compared to 2019,” while “in 2021 they increased far more, by 18% compared to 2019.” Grunwald notes that while this increase was “historically unusual, larger than in any two-year period in the last decade,” it is also much smaller than the 2021 PERF study suggested, and about a third of it “can be explained by pre-existing trends that existed long before the events of 2020.”

“Overall, the cumulative effect on total employment by the end of 2021 was only 1%,” Grunwald concludes. “This was not due to increased lateral mobility (officers moving to another department or role within law enforcement), as some have wondered. Rather, (the database) shows that the vast majority of excess layoffs in 2021 were due to officers leaving the field, at least for a while.” However, he acknowledges that “a sizable minority of large departments (those with 500 or more officers) were significantly impacted, losing over 5% of staff by the end of 2021.”

When asked why officers chose to leave the police force at this point, Grunwald acknowledged that he was unable to test for factors such as “social hostility” or criticism from city leaders that make officers feel unsupported. But he did examine “whether the intensity of local protests had an impact on local firings” by comparing police firing rates to reported attendance at over 9,800 protests in the summer of 2020. “The results,” Grunwald concluded, “provide no evidence that more intense political activism led to more firings at the agencies with the highest protest intensity.”

Instead, Grunwald suggests four possible alternatives for an increase in officer resignations. “The first is economicallyhe writes. “Like workers in other fields, civil servants are quitting to get better pay, benefits, training and advancement opportunities – especially during periods of economic growth….The U.S. labor market has grown dramatically in the first half of 2021, with monthly job openings increasing 70% through the end of the year.” In June 2021, the same month that the PERF survey found a huge increase in civil servant retirements and resignations, The New York Times published an article titled “Why cops have been quitting in droves over the past year.” The article focused on the Asheville Police Department as a microcosm of the national trend, noting that officers felt increasingly “demoralized,” but also noted that the starting salary is $37,000, which is nowhere near enough to buy a home in the city.

Grunwald identified the pandemic itself as another possible factor. Officials are not only struggling with “personal obligations such as family or childcare,” but also with “burnout” because “the pandemic has exacerbated old stressors and created new ones.”

Grunwald also suspects that political activism may have contributed to the turnover among civil servants, either as a result of demoralizing protests or pressure for reform. However, “this timing also fits with the pandemic” and cannot be easily separated from it.

Finally, he suggests that demographic changes may have played a role, as large numbers of officers already approaching retirement age, hired either as part of the baby boomer generation or under the 1994 Crime Act, may have taken the opportunity to quit their jobs. The Marshall Project reported in January 2023 that while some cities and counties have struggled to staff their police departments in the years since 2020, those counties have struggled to find “firefighters, bus drivers, and other government employees” as the overall labor market has recovered.

There are other plausible explanations, too. John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University, noted that “a police officer’s annual pension payment is a function of his total income – not base salary, but salary PLUS OVERTIME – of his senior years.” In Atlanta, overtime pay for police officers doubled in 2020; Chicago paid out over $177 million in overtime that year, a 27 percent increase from the previous year.

Grunwald’s findings won’t allay all concerns about the current state of policing—his data can’t, for example, tell us whether cops are “quietly quitting,” meaning staying on the force but showing only a minimal amount of effort. But they do show that, despite recent scaremongering, the 2020 protests probably didn’t cause cops to flee for the exits in droves.