Police already struggle to find recruits. Public scrutiny makes it harder, poll shows

Police departments have been struggling with recruiting and retaining officers for years, but with public scrutiny toward cops seemingly at an all-time high, very few are interested in earning a badge — and among those who have, there’s temptation to turn it in.

Weeks of nationwide protests against racial injustice, fueled by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor during encounters with police, have kicked off serious discussions about fundamentally rethinking the way policing is done in the United States, including demands to “defund the police,” McClatchy News reported.

Calls to abolish the police, dismantle and restructure police departments, or to simply enact reforms were further ignited by the June 12 death of Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man shot as he fled Atlanta police, following an altercation wherein he allegedly took a taser from one of the officers, outlets report.

Atlanta’s chief of police resigned soon after the incident.

Rocky Harnen, a chief deputy in Alabama, said the death of Floyd in Minneapolis casts a shadow on departments across the country, and on the profession as a whole, he told WAFF.

Floyd, who was Black, died in police custody after one of four arresting officers placed a knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.

“Every cop that I’ve talked to understands that what happened in Minneapolis was a tragedy, and it should not have happened. That being said, I don’t think all of us should be accountable for the misdoings of one, two, or three people,” Harnen said.

Not only are recruiting efforts taking a hit, one of Harnen’s deputies decided to find a new line of work, he said.

“He thinks the attitude towards any law-enforcement is so bad, he’s ready to get out of it. We lost one good man, because of that,” he told the outlet.

In Florida, police tell a similar story.

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office has 59 empty positions, Fort Lauderdale has 12, Miami-Dade police have 99 slots unfilled, and the city of Miami’s police department has 14, WPLG reported.

“It’s becoming more difficult,” Jeff Bell, head of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association, told the outlet. “I’m getting a lot more phone calls about officers just wanting to leave. They’ve had enough.”

Media attention, politics, and a lack of qualified candidates are all in part to blame, Bell said.

Most officers who resign do so in their first five years, a 2019 study from the Police Executive Research Forum found.

“Increased scrutiny and criticism,” was listed as a possible contributor to those figures, as well as more job opportunities in other fields, and too few candidates capable of meeting demands of modern policing, according to the study.

This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 4:18 PM with the headline "Police already struggle to find recruits. Public scrutiny makes it harder, poll shows."