Episode 6: Police Hiring and Retention

Police agencies are experiencing an increased loss in staffing and complex issues when trying to fill those positions.  

This week Dr. Joe Schafer from Arizona State University's School of Criminology & Criminal Justice joins the podcast to explore the issue of hiring and retention.  Joe goes beyond the obvious factors, such as better pay, to discuss subtle elements of hiring and retention, such as generational considerations in how officers view the occupation, temporary assignments to relieve stress, and agency consolidation to reduce the need for officers to find job enrichment in larger departments.  

Joe's report can be found at the following:

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://morrisoninstitute.asu.edu/sites/default/files/2024-01/5%20-%20Public%20Service%20Leader%20Interviews%2B%202024.pdf

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Transcript

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street level police officers and
command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better
programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
To some extent, the recruiting and hiring process for police officers has always been
a burden on both the agency and the potential officer.
This was primarily because of the time consuming process of interviews, tests, and the background
investigations.
For my own experience, it was roughly eight months between the day I first sent off the
application until I finally took a seat in the police academy.
A recent report by the Police Executive Research Forum suggested that, until recently, a police
agency could expect nearly 100 applications for every one open position.
That pattern started to change in the mid 2010s, and Perf offered two reasons for this
decline in the number of sworn officers.
First, there had been an increase in retirement and resignations.
Second, there was a straight up decrease in applications, so nobody was getting hired
to fill those empty slots.
Perf reported that officer staffing levels fell by almost 5% between January 2020 and
January 2023.
There have been a few explanations for the slowdown in applications to police agencies,
including legitimacy questions regarding the policing profession itself, changes in the
values and expectations of younger workers, and an unseen change in the police roles and
responsibilities such as public service rather than law enforcement.
To help us dig into some of the research in this area, we are joined by Joe Schaeffer.
Joe was the chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois'
University and is now a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona
State University.
He has also done an extensive amount of research at the FBI National Academy, and Joe was one
of the reasons that I was able to get in there as well.
So thank you for that, Joe, and welcome to the podcast.
Thanks, Scott, and thanks for having me on the Police and Service Training Podcast.
I'm happy to be here today.
Now, as I mentioned, you did a lot of research at the National Academy, and much of it dealt
with police leadership, and you've been a commissioner with the Commission on Accreditation
in Law Enforcement Agencies.
I left that out of your bio because I just don't have that much time.
But can you explain how you became interested in police hiring as a subject for research?
Well, as you mentioned, I've always had a lot of interest in kind of police issues that
are maybe a bit more in the station house than maybe at the street level.
So a lot of the work I've done is looked at the experiences and perceptions of police
leaders, issues of leadership, of organizational change.
And so in working with Kalia, some of the ideas around recruitment and hiring just kind
of bubbled to the surface a few years ago on some work I did with Jeff Nowacki and Julie
Hibden, looking at these types of patterns and practices among Kalia agencies.
Because part of the Kalia process is agencies have to annually track, report, and analyze
hiring data, for example, the number of applicants by demographics and the outcomes of their
hiring decisions.
And so that's pretty uncommon data.
And we were able to work with Kalia about five years ago to really begin to dig into
some of that data.
And that's led to several other projects with Kalia and here at ASU as well.
Oh, OK.
Very good.
Typically, I ask guests when they're talking about the research to provide a 30-second
overview of why the topic of conversation is so important.
But I think we've kind of nailed that already.
Still, can you give us an overview of what you did in Arizona?
Yeah.
So we're part of two projects here in Arizona, one that we did in the summer of 2023, looking
at police and fire recruitment and retention issues.
And we're currently doing a project looking at those issues among detention officers,
detention personnel who are, you know, we see very similar challenges in that population.
The fire service is newer to this problem than policing, but they're starting to see
this situation as well.
And what we take away from all three of those audiences is that pay and benefits matter.
They are absolutely part of the conversation.
But there's a lot of other things that agencies can control more directly that might cost
some thought and some effort, but don't necessarily cost, you know, big ticket, you know, don't
necessarily have big monetary values associated with them that agencies can do to recruit
and retain police, fire, detention, other types of public safety personnel.
That leads me into a couple of the more focused areas of your study that I'm going to see
if I can track it down again.
I know I have it, but find it.
I'm going to post it to the, there's probably a link somewhere.
I'll post it to the notes for the podcast.
So you mentioned better pay and you didn't mention, but the same basic area of topic
is the expense of living in a larger city.
I know a couple of officers who worked in the NYPD, they lived in Westchester County
when I was talking to them, they said it was an hour and a half commute, an hour and a
half each way, which was just absolutely crazy.
But I wanted to ask about something else you have in there, and this is not the first time
I've heard it.
I've heard it in just general conversations with police officers.
The work-life balance.
This is something I've seen the agencies have to deal with.
So for example, there's been a lot of overtime being paid to agencies, to officers in New
York States to deal with the hotspot policing and gun violence.
Agencies are just having a bear of a time getting any of the younger officers to take
the OT.
And the sergeants being responsible are trying to give the OT to people who are actually
going to do the job, not just somebody who's going out there to sit for eight hours, but
they can't get the younger people to take it.
And they're usually more enthusiastic about the job.
So it's basically a problem that they have.
Now, 20 years ago, officers couldn't get enough of it.
I remember when I was a cop, just OT, great, great, great, I'll take it.
What's going on with this now, with this new generation?
Is that an issue?
It absolutely is an issue, and I don't think it's unique to policing or public safety.
I think it is a generational shift.
I think, Scott, you and I are of roughly the same generation.
I was, and still to some extent am, more money motivated than my late teen, early 20-year-old
kids are.
I can see in them part of the values of the current generation.
In our generation, people talked about work-life balance, and they made maybe some improvements
beyond prior generations in terms of maybe paying a little bit more attention to the
health and well-being of their marriage and their partnerships and those types of things
but still were very financially motivated and driven and sometimes created lifestyles
that put people on that hamster wheel of needing the overtime to pay for bigger houses, to
pay for more toys.
I think partly what we may be seeing in the current generation is they're actually putting
their lifestyle where their mouth is, if you will.
They are choosing a more economically constrained lifestyle because they want work-life balance.
They're willing to work and be professional for 40 hours a week, but they're not motivated
to do it for more than that.
I interviewed a detention officer earlier today for one of the Arizona projects I mentioned,
who indicated to me that he routinely works 60 to 70 hours a week with overtime and has
for ages, and partly that's because his facility is understaffed and he feels a duty to have
presence so that his coworkers are safe, but it's also a financial consideration.
I think for years, public safety in particular got away with thinner staffing when there
was a lot of interest in the profession by paying a lot of overtime out to people, which
probably, if you did the math, was cheaper than hiring more bodies.
Public safety organizations created this tradition and culture where you put people on that hamster
wheel and random, random, random on overtime and let them develop these dependencies.
The agency needed people to do that, and now we've got a generation that arguably is a
lot smarter than some of us were about these things.
Time will tell, right?
We see fewer medical and mental health issues, fewer issues with relationship strife and
disillusion and things like that when people are saying, no, I will be professional.
I will give you 40 hours of serious dedicated commitment, but that's all you get from me.
It's not my fault that for decades you, as a city or a county, chose to under-support
your public safety operations by paying overtime instead of hiring more bodies.
It's not my job to put my well-being and my family in front of that situation.
That's great.
It's also one of those things, I'm not sure how to frame this, and I'm not asking it as
a question, but it was a thought that some of the agencies, the expectation is to hire
officers and pay them more, but it's almost like they have to pay them more to get them
in, but you're still only going to get 40 hours, like you said.
They're taking advantage of the, you're needing me so you can pay me.
Thank you for paying me more, but I don't need the overtime because you're paying me
more already.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, if the base pay goes up, that takes away some of the incentive for the overtime.
Absolutely.
And if people are not strongly fiscally motivated, they don't care what the overtime opportunities
and payout is.
They're just not going to be motivated to give up days off or prolong their work days
in order to, you know, even though it can be really lucrative as we know, they're just
not as motivated by that.
You mentioned something else in the report.
I'm going to quote this, it's just very short, regular mental and physical health screenings
of the officers.
Okay, now, I don't want to put you on the spot, but maybe I will be in, you know, sorry
about that.
But most agencies don't have physical agility standards.
Once you're done with the academy, go to the academy, you do your pushups, your sit ups,
you run the mile and a half, whatever it might be.
Once you're done, you satisfy the basic requirement out the door.
You go and very few agencies that I know of have a requirement to maintain that there
might be incentives, but there's no requirement.
And I'll admit upfront that I'm not completely familiar with the research in this area, but
Seeking out mental health services has been problematic in policing.
It's one of the reasons that agencies, it was frowned upon, it was looked at, looked
upon as being weak.
And that's one of the reasons agencies, when I worked in Houston, they had a policy, and
this was years ago, that if you were involved in a shooting, they were learning that these
are very stressful situations, so they would require that you saw the staff psychologist
if you were involved.
If the officer was required to go, this basically eliminates the stigma of that action, that
behavior.
So what's going on now with the hiring and retention world that this is something that's
part of it?
Yeah, and this is becoming a conversation in a few locations, and it's the state of
Illinois actually, maybe 2022, 2023, passed some legislation that requires this statewide.
I believe it's every three years officers are supposed to spend an hour or 50 minutes
or what have you with some type of behavioral health specialist for just kind of a how's
it going conversation.
Part of that is intended, I think, to de-stigmatize some of the issues you're talking about, right?
Like if we all have to go once every three years, maybe that shows that this isn't that
big of a deal, this isn't a sign of weakness.
And obviously, partly this is coming on the heels of the summer of 2020, and I think my
impression in Illinois was it was motivated by wanting to put some actionable steps behind
ensuring that officers were in a proper mental headspace, that they were not stressed, suffering
from PTSD, things like that, that might lead them to make a poor snap decision in the field.
Now whether these things at a statewide level become incredibly complicated very quickly,
whether there's enough qualified and willing clinicians to step into that, whether an hour
conversation once every three years, I mean, can somebody suffering from PTSD make their
way through that evading detection if they're not wanting to concede that?
Even potentially, is my obligation as an officer just simply to sit in that room for 50 minutes?
Am I obligated to say anything or can I sit there with my arms crossed and smile nicely
and just wait for the hour to end?
All of that is really kind of nibbling at the negative edges of the situation.
I think the bigger issue is might there be benefit in destigmatizing, in normalizing,
in creating an entry point through which personnel might be able to recognize they could use
some help and need more than 50 minutes every three years that they might need those services.
The bigger challenge that I've seen in some other projects is when people understand they
need help but don't feel like they can find a clinician that understands the world of
police officers, public safety personnel, military personnel sometimes have the same
challenge that broadly trained clinicians may not understand their world, their challenges,
their sense of dark humor, things of that nature.
And so I've done other projects where we've talked with officers who shared, yeah, I mean,
I wasn't, generically speaking, ashamed that I needed help.
I didn't maybe scream it from the, you know, in the locker room, but I let coworkers know
and I let some of them know when they expressed interest, go to this person because they understand
us, they get us, they can, don't, you know, don't just go to anybody.
So they coveted these kind of one-to-one connections with clinicians they perceived got it.
Nice.
I did look at something about mental health for police officers and you said something
which just jarred my memory that the ability of web-based conversations like we're having
now, we can see each other and I don't have to leave the house, nobody's going to see
me go to the office, I'm not going to bump into somebody else that might be there as
well.
So that opportunity, you know, broadens as well.
But again, the idea of mental health for hiring and retention, I think this is important to
at least consider these things for police agencies to say, okay, if this is what they're
asking for, we need to provide it and as you say, we'll try to work out the bumps along
the way, but at least it's something that they're, you know, they're just not ignoring.
So another thing I wanted to follow up on, it's been hired for agencies to hire people
and if the pool of applicants is getting smaller, is there any indication that the agencies
are lowering their standards for hiring such as physical agility or the one that struck
me as, you know, I'm not conflicted about it, I understand it needs to be done, I'm
just wondering how thorough it needs to be, a background check.
Any indication that agencies are, you know, dropping those off?
You know, that's not something in my work that we've been systematically tracking.
I think what I would say anecdotally is most of the agencies and the representatives we're
talking about aren't overtly talking about their agency lowering standards with a couple
of exceptions.
I have come across a few agencies in some of these projects where that has been the
case and that doesn't often sit well with seasoned personnel who perceive that the quality
of what's coming out of the academy is not what it used to be and I've had people in
interviews say, you know, I'd rather work short staffed than work with, you know, a
squad of what they're giving us now.
Now that's being glib and hyperbolic and whether that's, but I think it represents,
yeah, maybe there's a little bit of a generational self-aggrandizement and generational cutting
down kids these days embedded in that, but people do also see when there are changes
and some of that might be, you know, wrapped up in things like the expansion of recreational
marijuana, so the relaxing or the, you know, doing away with standards in states with
recreational marijuana on, you know, complete prohibitions there and maybe putting in, you
know, no use above us, you know, no more than X times, no use within 12 months, whatever
the case may be.
Where we do see it, though, I think is conversations around weakening or loosening educational
standards and in some places, if it's allowed within state law, reducing age of entry,
which, you know, there's not a ton of great research on that latter point, but there are a
couple of really interesting studies.
They're a bit dated, but you may have seen some of these that suggest that the age at
which somebody starts a law enforcement career, if you start them, and I'm just making up,
you know, arbitrary numbers here to illustrate, but yeah, that somebody who starts a career
and does 25 years starting at 19 versus somebody starting at 24 in the same 25-year period,
in the same 25-year period, that younger person, that person who's younger when they enter
tends to, up to a certain point, have more disciplinary and behavioral problems.
So I think agencies have to be cautious about dropping that age of entry standard, even
if it's allowed.
And again, I've anecdotally heard that in some of the conversations in some of these
Arizona projects, even on policing and detention officers, concerns that you need people that
have a little more maturity in life experience than a 19, 20, 21-year-old, that people need
to, that's a lot of power and responsibility and authority, and maybe they're not ready
to handle that.
And it's not just that they're going to get in trouble early in their career.
They may be a behavioral performance problem throughout a career, more so than somebody,
not to say that, you know, at 40, you're going to be better than 25, but 25 may make a big
difference, or even 23 or 22.
So agencies have to be really, I think, cautious about relaxing those standards, as well as
the background stuff.
You may recall some of our friends from the FBI Academy days who, again, this is anecdotal,
but did some really interesting analyses of a few major agencies that had hiring bursts
at various times in the 80s and 90s, and as a result, presumptively relaxed some entry
standards to capitalize on permission to grow their ranks.
And often those agencies within six to eight years had a major scandal.
And a lot of the scandals we see in the 90s and early 2000s, if you do the timeline forensics
for those agencies and even some of those personnel, you see they were hired in a time
when the doors were being thrown open.
And I think that's a risk agencies need to be cautious about, should we see a turn in
this lack of interest in public safety careers?
They understandably want to get those ranks back up, but cutting corners to get bodies
in, it's a short-term gain and potentially a long-term liability.
Yeah.
You mentioned something.
I'm going to go back before the background check.
You mentioned the age of a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old.
I was in a meeting just the other day with chiefs from the entire county, and there was
a representative there from the state who said that there's legislation, you know, how
long it'll take, who the hell knows, with legislation that was going to raise the limit
from 35 in New York to 40.
And nobody in the room said a word about it.
Now, I didn't get a chance to ask, is this because of the hiring complications?
It's difficult to get, you know, anybody in the door anyway, or is it just because, yeah,
the 38, 39-year-old, you know, physically decent shape?
Well, you're going to get them until they're, you know, 60, then you're 20 years.
And, you know, I'm in my early 60s and well, I like to think I'm kind of responsible that,
but it opens the door to exactly what you're saying.
These are much more mature people, tons of life experience, and it'll take 20 years before,
you know, we'll be out of the process by then to research them to see how do they turn out
if we can get a cohort of 40-year-olds in New York or 39-year-olds, how do they turn
out after 20 years?
That'd be really interesting.
Now, again, back to your report, one of the points you made about Arizona, and I sincerely
believe this applies to almost every state, is the issue of small and rural police agencies.
Now, I live in Western New York.
People picture New York as New York City.
And the thing is, Buffalo, 50 miles.
Rochester, 50 miles.
Syracuse.
And in between, there are a ton of smaller agencies.
In fact, I think it's something like 88 percent of police agencies across the country
have less than 50 officers total.
So how is that impacting the hiring process?
Again, I'm getting into the minutia.
I thought to myself, one of the problems you were running into that you mentioned was a
small agency would hire somebody and a couple of years later, bang, they're gone and they
go to Phoenix.
This is a follow-up question.
I'll ask it anyway.
Is it possible for the states to subsidize those agencies so that they can keep these
officers in those smaller locations and rural areas?
Yeah, I think that it's possible that, you know, whether there's the political will to
do that, you know, that stat, you know, about 88 percent of agencies employing fewer than
50 officers and many of them fewer than 20 or 25 officers, you know, it speaks to the
very provincial nature of policing, which we love, I think, generally as Americans.
But I think in situations like this, it also speaks to the massive inefficiency of that.
So we are taking a system that becomes very inefficient, has a lot of redundancy because
each agency needs to have somebody with some capacity to do X, Y and Z, right?
They need a range officer.
They need somebody trained to handle property and evidence.
They need, you know, not that those are full-time positions in a small agency, but it also,
we love having that local or that perception of local input and control as citizens over
our local police and voice in local policing.
But, you know, what we could potentially see is that this becomes the the inflection point
where more agencies start to look at regional consolidation and collaboration because.
We could reduce some of that redundancy, which would yield potentially some, you know,
some fiscal benefits.
And we may be able to get relatively comparable service while maybe making it more attractive
to go to a small, moderate agency than a really small agency, because, you know, years ago,
I remember needing to chat with a chief of a small police department and we had an appointment
set up and I show up in person to chat with him and he was busy kind of trying to
get himself out the door and he said, I'm really sorry, I can't talk with you today.
We had a fender bender and I need to go take the report, right?
So even though they're the chief executive of this small agency, they're still doing
frontline and that's not a criticism of that chief's decision, but it's an illustration
of, you know, very different being the chief of NYPD or even Buffalo and being in many
of these small agencies and so, you know, it may be that there's a time for a greater
conversation about consolidating, regionalizing some aspects of policing, because that also
then, one of the things we see in our research is, you know, yes, pay and benefits matter,
but people also want to be treated well and people want some career expansion, you know,
people don't want to generally work patrol for 25 years.
They may think they do when they start it, but often they get disillusioned of that idea
after a while and they want at least something else in the mix. They want new challenges,
new opportunities, that's really hard for those small agencies to provide. So even,
and I'm not saying consolidate at the county level or put everything under, you know,
sheriffs or county police departments necessarily, but the bigger the agency, the more opportunity
there can be to specialize and, you know, I think this connects back with mental health
and well-being, right? Like getting a break from the grind of incident response and call response
can be a pushback and a buffer on mental health, burnout, turnover intention, things like that.
Even if I'm still doing that some of the time, if I have this other task I'm responsible for
a couple days a week, a couple days a month, or if we're big enough,
some of the agencies we've spoken with have talked about trying to give people a break from
patrol by giving them an opportunity to basically shadow or intern in a detective role for two or
three weeks, right? Let people work plain clothes, you're still a patrol officer, you're not a
detective, but we want to, you know, it lets us maybe see who is a good candidate for future
promotion, but it gives you a little bit of a breather and a reprieve. It gets you off of
nights for a couple of weeks. It lets you spend some time with your spouse and kids. It lets you
just do something different. And can that be a way to, is that a carrot that might motivate you for
a couple of years leading into and out of that experience? And then can we find something else
in a couple of years to do that, even if we're keeping you in a patrol assignment? So that's
kind of a long-winded way of saying, you know, I think that small agencies absolutely have
challenges here. I think the question is, you know, should this be the inflection point for
a greater conversation about the very odd way we structure US law enforcement? As you well know,
18 and a half thousand agencies, exponentially more than any other nation. I've never done the
math, but probably there's almost as many police departments in the US as there is everywhere else
in the entire world collectively. I suspect we're approaching that equivalency. I've never done the
math. So is this an inflection point? Is this part of a reason to say, maybe we really ought to
rethink whether we have the most rational way of structuring as a nation, our public safety and
policing systems? That's a big change from, or conversationally, that's a big shift from the
hiring we started our conversation with. But there's also something, this isn't a question,
this is a point you made in the report, was the continuous communication during the hiring process.
And decades ago when I got hired, I sent the application, I sat at home and waited until I
got a response, sent in the follow-up. It was, okay, more background information than wait a
couple of weeks to get a response. Well, now with emails, it's probably something that agencies,
people are waiting. They want to know. They want to hear some answers. They're anxious. They've
applied for this position. This is really important to them. So keeping in touch with them,
I don't think it should be terribly complicated. Again, something to consider. If you're a larger
agency, it might be a bearer. Got it. I understand that. But even so, when I applied in Houston,
there was a person that contacted me that had a phone number that if I had any questions,
give them a call. And so I left that door open. I didn't have any more questions. I just sat around
and waited. But if I called him, he probably would have said, well, you're in the background
check process now or gave me some reason to be hopeful. But even now with the internet,
emails, the system is set up for better communications. I thought that was great.
Now we're starting to run out of time, but do you have, can you identify two,
maybe three implications that if we haven't nailed them already for the police personnel,
practice leaders, anything like that? Yeah. I mean, I think one ties in with your comments
just now, Scott, and that's, you know, we need people to think about
other ways of doing things because technology lets us do things we couldn't do in the past.
But also, you know, in the area you're alluding to, the fish jumped into the boat, right? We
didn't have to work real hard to bait that situation. When you had up to 100 applicants
for each open position, you didn't have to work hard and you didn't have to,
to be blunt, you could be a little cavalier about how you treated people because if somebody got
mad and walked away, there were plenty of good people behind him willing to step up
another spot in line. Now we have both a need to be a little more high touch and we have a need to,
we have technology that lets us do that. And so we are definitely hearing that from agencies,
as well as just looking at ways to squeeze out efficiencies in the process, to not have a step
every six weeks. Some agencies experimenting with, you know, literally in a 60-hour weekend,
can we go from you filed an applicant application to if you pass all the hurdles,
you will walk out with a conditional offer pending background, medical, polygraph,
mental screening, things like that. So we're going to do the written, the physical,
an initial maybe quick background, an oral board, whatever, you know, maybe one or two other steps,
because we want to beat the competition because people are putting out multiple applications.
So if we can get you faster, that's to our benefit. But also thinking about
the how leadership plays into this, whether that's thinking about people's aspirations,
thinking about their career development, whatever the case may be, leadership matters in all of
this. And what we hear very consistently across all of these projects is people want to be treated
well and respected. And agencies that go through periods of poor toxic leadership often have people
hemorrhaging out the door, because people are less willing to put up with that, particularly,
and we won't have time to get into this, but particularly as pensions are becoming less
common, the golden handcuffs of a pension are not tethering people or in periods of time
where there's poor leadership to the organization makes it much easier to walk away.
Excellent information. Joe Schaefer, thank you very much for coming out to the podcast. I
greatly appreciate it. You have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you. Appreciate the
opportunity. Scott enjoyed talking with you. You too. Take care.
That's it for this episode of the police in service training podcast. I want to thank you,
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