Repost: Six Reasons the Exodus of Police Officers Is Worse Than You Think
The debut article on American Peace Officer is surprisingly relevant two years later
Yesterday, American Peace Officer on Substack, achieved a significant subscription milestone. My initial foray into the new frontier of self-publishing a newsletter on February 6, 2023, consisted of rewriting a previously published article from 2021 that had been well received at the time. Reading it again with fresh eyes makes me realize how relevant it remains - whether four or two years ago. Since then, I’ve published more than 100 articles and videos on leadership, recruiting, training, best practices and bad tactics.
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The mass exodus of officers is real, and it isn’t just happening in Seattle and New York.
Those are places where there have been highly publicized and successful movements to both reduce police funding and eliminate anti-crime efforts. Anti-police protests are allowed to progress from being ‘mostly peaceful’ to full blown riots. Officers are being ordered to retreat from defensible positions and being deprived of less-lethal measures to control civil unrest.
Any American with respect for the rule of law sees the obvious reasons why so many dedicated law enforcement officers are taking off the badge and hanging up the belt forever. This is more than a staffing shortage and there are six reasons why this changes the profession and the safety of the public long-term.
6. Generation Z
This will be covered fully in an article of its own. I recently worked on a project with a public safety training center and the two major considerations were keeping the on-duty officers near the city and fulfilling the training needs and desires of their Gen Z officers to retain them. In what can only be described as a table turning maneuver, these younger officers and candidates have made themselves the consumers and recruiters the ones who provide the service to them.
5. The Origin Story: The 1994 Crime Bill
Of the numerous articles written by law enforcement scholars, none that I have read have mentioned the Clinton Crime Bill in the context of the tremendous wave of retirements that are occuring 27 years after the three-year program initiated. President Clinton’s promise, in 1993, was that he was going to put an additional 100,000 cops on the street over the next three years.
The crime bill caused an obvious effect why people with 25-year pensions are leaving in droves. This was coming and was ignored. The federal government provided grants to departments to hire about 100,000 officers during 1995, 1996 and 1997.
This was not going to benefit a department with less than fifty officers, it actually caused pain for those smaller departments. Here’s why:
The federal grants funded officers for the first three years, but local governments have to pay them, and their benefits for the remaining 27, 22 or 17 years, depending on how generous their high-risk pension schemes were when officers were hired. This generous hiring program came with strings attached that excluded smaller cities. Officers funded by the program could not be regular patrol cops answering 911 emergency and standard dispatch calls but serve as ‘community oriented’ officers during the grant period to interact with community members. Therefore, it was common for large agencies with funded vacancies to take patrol officers from their regular assignments, create bike patrols or other qualifying assignments to work the funded ‘weed and seed’ districts and then backfill their vacancies with pre-certified officers from the smaller agencies.
In smaller agencies, officers who experienced barriers in getting the better paying larger agency jobs now had the experience, and most importantly, the additional training, to walk into those backfill vacancies funded by the crime bill. Adding another wrinkle to this scenario, many officers from the smaller agencies had served long enough to be vested in their first agency’s pension. Many of these are the officers retiring today with 25 to 35 years on.
4. The Majority of Current Officers Would Not Recommend the Profession
In a cultural reversal, a poll in June 2020 by Police One of more than 10,000 current officers:
“… when asked if they would recommend police work to a son or daughter, a whopping 80.5% said no while just 7.2% said they would. The remaining 12.3% said they weren’t sure.”
To understand the gravity of this redirection, no matter the investment in promoting recruiting, more than between 60 and 75 percent of candidates came from the influence of friends and family. Today, the people with the ‘instinctive gifts’ are being told by the people they trust the most to avoid law enforcement.
While the reported exodus is a bad thing, the worse thing is that the message that the career is ‘kryptonite’ is not coming from the six percent (in June 2020) that are retiring. That message is coming from the majority of the current 94% who remain.
Officers are leaving today because they need to, not because they want to. Many would have preferred to stay given better circumstances.
3. The Perceived Betrayal of Officers by Their Police and Political Leadership.
A law enforcement leader addressed the media recently regarding his agency’s reduction in pedestrian and vehicle stops by over 50% since 2012. First, they boasted about it on social media, then real questions were asked regarding the spike in violent crime with more than double the number of shootings and gunshot victims.
Immediately following the death of George Floyd, national police groups such as the International Association of Chiefs of Police and Major Cities Chiefs pushed out rushed statements condemning the disturbing video.
Reform candidates who now occupy many major prosecutors’ offices throughout the country void the dangerous work of our sworn officers and deputies while promising to end cash bail, not pursue death penalty cases of cop-killers, disregard all minimum mandatory or sentence enhancements and diversion programs for all ‘low-level’ offenses.
Their message: You arrest them and we won’t prosecute.
The betrayal is without apology. On May 5, 2021, the mayor of Atlanta commented on the decision to immediately fire the officer - without due process - who shot Rayshard Brooks (while he was committing the crime of aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer with a stolen weapon designed to incapacity an adversary) saying:
“Given the volatile state of our city and nation last summer, the decision to terminate this officer, after he fatally shot Mr. Brooks in the back, was the right thing to do. Had immediate action not been taken, I firmly believe that the public safety crisis we experienced during that time would have been significantly worse.”
The unregulated protests resulted in the arson destruction of the fast food store and the murder of an innocent eight year old girl.
These words bend and distort the reality of acquiescing to the mob. While the circumstances of Chief Erica Shields’ departure to Louisville of all places remain unknown, it is obviously a coincidence that it occurred with the mayor’s insistence on the immediate termination of the officer without due process.
On the occasion of the Chauvin verdict, a sheriff tweeted: “From the beginning, I have said that the law enforcement actions that resulted in George Floyd’s death were indefensible, unexplainable, and criminal.” Another famous sheriff tweeted that “…(Chauvin) would have been fired and arrested that same day.” More and more law enforcement leaders are immediately commenting on their own officers’ actions, frequently based on a snippet of out-of-context video and casting doubt on the legitimacy of their actions. Two years ago, these executives would be promising action, against the officer, if there was evidence following an investigation.
2. Because Of Crazy Recruiting Policies, It Will Not Be Getting Better Soon
Certainly, some brilliant person has come up with the solution to the problem by now. We have a lot of people who need jobs. Give them jobs. Sounds good. Let’s go! Hold on, not so quick! There are a number of considerations that need to be addressed. The first are diversity goals.
The Center for Policing Equity gathers data from police organizations to evaluate the demographics of the people who are stopped against the demographics of the officers who stopped them. In other words, their analysis is based on whether a white officer stopped a black citizen, or a black officer stopped a white citizen, and then simply compare that to census data.
Their analysis determines inequity based on the imbalance of who is stopped by whom. In contrast, Bob Scales, endorses analysis on crime data before layering in demographics and finds the correlation that explains the imbalance.
As a rule, agencies attempt to recruit candidates who reflect the community. There is an unstated promise that if one race or ethnic group represents a specific percentage of the population, that there is a benefit to having approximately the same identity group in police uniform.
While there are claims that getting the identity groups in accurate percentages will have any benefit outside of a lawsuit, there is ample evidence that today, unreasonable residency requirements are of no benefit. There was a functional reason for it in the past and now only serves as a detriment to successful recruiting.
Like an old ghost, legislation has been filed recently to require officers to reside in the city itself. In 2020, Philadelphia
“…passed legislation Thursday that would mandate the city only hire people -- including aspiring police officers -- who have been living in Philadelphia for at least one year prior to the job appointment.“
Currently, this requirement is temporarily waived by the civil service board but recruits are still required to establish residency in the city within one year. Retired police captain and professor Dorothy Moses Schulz writes in a City Journal article:
“The police union also opposes it. And criminologists say there isn’t evidence to show that limiting recruitment to just city residents would help diversify the force in the long run.”
In New York last year, legislators tried to pass state law that exclusively required New York City newly hired officers to reside within the city. Technically, they proposed this for every municipality over one million in population of which New York City is the only city above that threshold in the state.
Also, consent decrees are the inevitable outcome of any Justice Department civil rights investigation. One of the standard benchmarks is to mandate more robust minority hiring and representation after the organization has been branded racist. You might need to read that again.
Under the guise of criminal justice reform, there are multiple bills calling for even higher standards for employing new police officers. Like the crime bill, this will have an even greater negative effect on the smaller agencies who struggle to keep minimum manning on the road.
Millennials and Gen Z are not the problem and are a vital part of the solution. I salute the amazing young people who I have been honored to work with and who are currently protecting and serving. We should all thank God for these wonderful young people and be glad they are here and appreciate their willingness to pick up the mantle.
We also must be honest by acknowledging that they will not have the same attachment to their career as the previous generation, and that’s not their fault. There is an unstoppable move to 401 style defined contribution pensions that, by nature, have portability. In the words of one new officer recently, ‘They aren’t giving me any reason to stay.’
1. The Talent Gap
But the greatest loss, and so far, the unreported loss, is that police aren’t able to practice the basic skills and hone their tools of the trade.
Officers of all seniority levels, due to the Coronavirus and then following the death of George Floyd, received what was basically good advice: to stand down for a while. This has come on the tail end of police curbing self-initiated activity due to the Ferguson Effect as established by law enforcement scholar Heather Mac Donald.
Since 2013, from experience working in a program office focused on violent crime initiatives, leadership buy-in on proactive operations began to wane. I can only imagine how great the negative impact in cities like Cleveland, Baltimore, New York, Chicago and St. Louis.
New field training officers will be the first to teach officers how to creatively use their time while accomplishing absolutely nothing, fully with management approval.
A decade ago, a sergeant came to me about an officer on his squad who wouldn’t walk up to suspicious people. “It’s not worth it to me,” the officer told him. At that time, that was someone who didn’t belong in police work.
A few years ago, I assisted an officer who had a talent for finding crime guns in criminal’s hands, but his cases were being dropped despite valid probable cause. One of his traffic stops, where the driver stopped with the bumper past the stop bar, found a convicted felon rear seat passenger, with a loaded AK-47 that was likely on the way to a drive-by shooting. I don’t doubt that a possible tragedy was averted that night.
Years ago, his initiative would be praised by his chain of command. Today he was questioned about why he made the stop on such a minor infraction.
Training imparts the knowledge of skills. With an experienced training officer, it also allows the development of talents in the practice of those skills. I went through the full sworn academy as a non-sworn community service officer. While I was very skilled and very trainable, I, admittedly, like many others in my academy class, wasn’t blessed with the natural talents. This is to say, you could teach me to sing where I might be valuable in a (very) large choir, but I’m never going to rival Frank Sinatra. Today, officers are being taught to answer calls and keep your head down.
There was, as the French say, a certain je ne sais quoi. An intangible quality where officers and deputies would approach a group and discern who was holding a weapon or drugs based on their behavior and cues. More importantly, these officers had a sense of who was going to fight, run or jump and took action before it even occurred to the suspect, ultimately enhancing safety. One such officer, treated his profession as a craft or an art; you would prefer to be with him on the most dangerous call rather than other officers on a ‘safe’ call.
No one alive today has ever actually heard the music of Bach performed by Bach. His time preceded recording and while we can precisely play the beautiful notes of his music, we will never actually know exactly what he sounded like on the instruments of his time.
It should be very concerning that these instinctual police giftings, talents or qualities will be lost forever as we are now engaged in an extremely dangerous new crime wave.
The generation gap in policing is here and wonderful young people who are filling those slots deserve everyone’s support.
(For answers on how police recruiting can be made more effective, check out Dr.
Substack here and his police hiring solution here.)If you recognize that there is no way that 0.4% of the population deserves 99% of the blame for society’s problems, then we have a good start. Pray with me for our amazing American Peace Officers!
Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com. His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.
References
https://www.city-journal.org/taking-on-progressive-prosecutors
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-nationwide-crime-wave-1432938425
https://apnews.com/article/rayshard-brooks-shooting-664fefd79db05fdb3bfed1873bab04b5
https://www.city-journal.org/residency-requirement-for-city-cops
https://apnews.com/article/rayshard-brooks-shooting-664fefd79db05fdb3bfed1873bab04b5
https://www.city-journal.org/residency-requirement-for-city-cops
Congrats on the anniversary Roland! You’re doing a great job and this article just cements that idea. You are spot on here. I remember reading this when it first came out. It absolutely resonates with me. Our profession is dying and people need to wake up.
Congrats on your anniversary, Roland! I have learned so much from you.