Is There a Crisis in Law Enforcement Staffing?

 Abstract

News media in the united States has been reporting on a crisis in law enforcement hiring for the past two years. Despite this reporting, law enforcement agencies have been increasing the number of sworn law enforcement officers they employ steadily over the past decade (2011 to 2021), not decreasing. Using data collated from United States Government sources, this article will show that the number of sworn law enforcement officers has increased. This article will address however that there are concerns with the future of law enforcement hiring brought by a shrinking pool of applicants that may be attributed to a steadily declining labor force participation rate and a steadily increasing number of jobs in other fields that may attract applicants away from the law enforcement profession.  

Introduction

Law enforcement officers are considered “first responders.” This designation, in general, means that law enforcement officers are expected to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. People in the United States expect that when they call 9-1-1 for police service, it will be provided promptly. So it can be kind of scary when headlines read: “U.S. Police  Departments Struggle With Critical Staffing Shortages,” and “Attorney general says Ohio is facing a law enforcement hiring crisis.” As always, it is important to look beyond the headlines and dive into the supposed crisis. Without identifying what the crisis is and what its roots are, there is no way to address it and move forward. So what is the crises?

Discussion

News agencies across the country are reporting that there is a crises in law enforcement staffing. The articles proclaim that officers are leaving police forces, that there aren’t enough applicants to fill those positions, and that law enforcement agencies are at historic lows. If the reader were to do an internet search for “Is there a crisis in law enforcement hiring,” the reader would find news articles from a wide range of ideological news sources, all for once agreeing on something, that there is indeed a crisis in hiring in law enforcement staffing. 

According to Chief Adrian Diaz of the Seattle Police Department, “We are at record lows in the city right now. I have about 1,080 deployable officers. This is the lowest I’ve seen our department.”

In February of 2022, Chief Patrice Andrews of the Durham North Carolina Police Department told CNN, “It’s been tough. We’ve had to be very creative with staffing, you know, putting investigators and those that typically wouldn’t necessarily be taking 911 calls, putting them back on the street. The 911 calls don’t stop. People are still having emergencies, the emergencies don’t stop and certainly the emergencies don’t care if you are 60% staffed or below.”

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray noted in an op ed written for FOX News in January 2023, “We have to develop new ways to meet the long-term challenge of recruiting more of the everyday heroes who keep us all safe. Today’s tight labor market certainly contributes to police recruiting challenges, but what I often hear is that a bigger issue is a sense among rank-and-file cops that too many in our society no longer respect their work.”

Academics have also weighed in on the topic with articles like the one authored by researchers from the Universities of Utah and Nebraska, Omaha in August of 2021. In the article, the researchers analyze 60 months of employment data at one large western police department and find that there was a marked increase in resignations in what they designate as the “Post Floyd period,” referring to the period of time after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis Minnesota.

There are also news articles showing that the crisis is not contained in state and local departments, but is striking federal agencies as well. One article from The Guardian, which quotes an article from The Wall Street Journal shows that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received a record number of applications in 2009, 68,500. However, by 2018, those numbers had dropped to a paltry 11,500.

There is further anecdotal evidence that can be found simply by having a conversation with law enforcement officers that are involved in the hiring process with their agencies. Your author is a full time law enforcement officer and has heard similar quotes to those above from law enforcement officers at the local, state, and federal levels. Your author has even been in the hiring process at the federal and local levels and seen the number of recruits dwindle with his own eyes. 

An article that is widely cited in the news articles that will be found in an internet search is one disseminated by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a research outfit governed by chief’s of police in the United States. The title of the article is “The Workforce Crisis, And What Police Agencies Are Doing About It.”. According to the article, published in 2019, PERF used a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics to highlight a decrease in total full-time sworn officers between 2013 and 2016. PERF further conducted a survey in which 63% of respondents stated that the number of applications to their departments had decreased over the past five years. The article also presents a “triple threat” of less recruits, more resignations, and more retiree’s fueling the workforce crisis that is afflicting law enforcement. 

There is contradictory evidence presented by the Marshall Project, a non profit criminal justice news publication. In an article published in September of 2021, the article posits that between 2019 and 2020, local police departments lost less than 1% of their workforce whereas the U.S. economy as a whole lost 6% of workers. Further, the article states that prior to the loss of 1%, departments enjoyed a hiring surplus with the number of sworn officers increasing in the decade leading up to 2019 and 2020.

So what to make of these news and academic articles and anecdotal evidence? Can we be sure that there really is a staffing crisis? To determine if there is indeed a crises, let’s look at statistics. At least three governmental agencies monitor the number of law enforcement officers in the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Census Bureau, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. All three use surveys to compile their numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys employers, the United States Census Bureau surveys the 50 state governments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation survey’s participating police departments directly (not all police departments choose to participate). Below are data tables compiling information from all three sources from 2011 to 2021:

Year	Number of Officers	Percent Change from Previous Year
2011	702,759	Not Calculated
2012	674,614	-4%
2013	672,060	-0.4%
2014	678,896	1%
2015	683,850	0.7%
2016	687,643	1.5%
2017	698,277	1.6%
2018	710,428	1.8%
2019	711,387	0.13%
2020	719,325	1.1%
2021	712,112	-1%

*United States Census Bureau Data Table (Total Increase/Decrease 2011 to 2021 2.43%, Average yearly increase/decrease .24%). Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll (Police Protection - Persons with Power of Arrest).

Year	Number of Officers	Percent Change from Previous Year
2011	733,166	Not Calculated
2012	688,874	-6%
2013	643,482	-6.5%
2014	649,777	0.98%
2015	652,682	0.45%
2016	663,576	1.7%
2017	673,477	1.5%
2018	704,744	4.4%
2019	712,697	1.1%
2020	718,906	0.87%
2021	688,138	-4.3%

*Federal Bureau of Investigation Data Table (Total Increase/Decrease 2011 to 2021 -5.8%, Average yearly increase/decrease -.58%). Uniform Crime Reporting (male and female police officers).

Year	Number of Officers	Percent Change from Previous Year
2011	854,270	Not Calculated
2012	845,230	-1%
2013	850,720	0.65%
2014	852,330	0.19%
2015	864,410	1.4%
2016	867,680	0.38%
2017	878,122	1.2%
2018	885,910	0.89%
2019	896,932	1.2%
2020	886,990	-1.1%
2021	905,090	2%

*Bureau of Labor Statistics Data Table (Total Increase/Decrease 2011 to 2021 5.81%, Average yearly increase/decrease .58%). Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (First line supervisors of police and detectives + detectives and criminal investigators + police and sheriff’s patrol officers + transit and railroad police).

Looking at the statistics from the three organizations, there are differences and similarities. The difference between the reporting from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the other two organizations is rather staggering as it shows a -5.8% decrease in officers between 2011 and 2021. The U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics both report an increase in officers. The Bureau Of labor statics actually shows the opposite of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with a 5.8% increase in officers between 2011 and 2021. The statistics are similar in that all three organizations show a decline in officers from 2011 to 2012 and an increase in officers between 2014 and 2019. Taking an average of the three organizations we find a .81% increase in officers from 2011 to 2021. 

There is also another entity that monitors the number of law enforcement officers in the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics. However they discontinued the monitoring in 2017. Though the data is incomplete compared to the other three sources, it has been included in this article as it is the organization that PERF quotes in their article. Below is a data table showing the number of law enforcement officers in the United States, as monitored by the Bureau of Justice statistics:

Year	Number of Officers	Percent Change from Previous Year
2011	735,544	Not Calculated
2012	710,154	-3.5%
2013	708,304	-0.3%
2014	714,514	0.9%
2015	719,422	0.7%
2016	728,847	1.3%
2017	728,590	-0.04%

*Bureau of Justice Statistics data table (Total Increase/Decrease 2011 to 2017 -.94%. Average yearly Increase/Decrease -.94%) Justice Expenditure and Employment Extracts Series (Police protection sworn and nonsworn employment and payrolls and percent distribution of full-time equivalent employment by state and type of government, States-local - total, Sworn full time equivalent)

The Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows a decrease of .94% over the time frame. It should be noted however that the other three datasets all show an average increase in officers from 2017 to 2021, which were not monitored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

When taking into account the average of  all datasets, it is clear that the number of sworn law enforcement officers in the United States has increased as opposed to decreasing. How to square the circle of all the anecdotal evidence and news articles about the shortage of law enforcement officers? First, it is important to take a deep look at the PERF article. 

The article is highly cited in articles about the subject. The article cites a document by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Full-Time Employees in Law Enforcement Agencies, 1997-2016. In this article, the Bureau of Justice Statistics takes data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey’s from 1997 to 2016 which occurs every three years. That survey shows a decrease between the 2013 survey and the 2016 survey (a loss of 23,417 law enforcement officers), which is what the PERF article hangs its hat on to justify the perceived crisis in law enforcement hiring. The reduction of officers in that time from (2013 to 2016) is consistent with data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but is contrary to the data from the United States Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and even data compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics itself.  What is further concerning is that the LEMAS surveys themselves show an overall increase in law enforcement numbers from 1997 to 2016 (an increase of 52,585 law enforcement officers). Based on this evidence, it seems that the PERF article, while highly cited, is statistically shallow. 

Statistics are one thing, but that does not address the survey conducted in the PERF article in which responding agencies reported a decrease in applications, the quotes mentioned above in which agency heads report being understaffed, or the anecdotal evidence provided by this author. One might be confident in going with the simplest answer, that with the number of law enforcement officers increasing over the last decade, the applicant pool is becoming more and more shallow as those applicants are hired, making it more difficult to find qualified candidates and fill holes in agencies. It would be more accurate and provide agencies with more information to develop strategies to find more applicants to look at the problem from a macro perspective.

Zooming out beyond the field of law enforcement, it is important to note that the Labor Force Participation Rate for the United States Population aged 15+ has been declining since its peak in 1995. In 1995, that peak was 66. In 2021, it was 61. Data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the United States Census Bureau confirm this decline. A report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics attributes this decline to a number of different reasons including the aging of the baby boomer generation. An article from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City puts forward that the decline can also be attributed to slowing population growth in the United States. No matter the reason, an important statistic that is noted in the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a report from The Brookings Institution, a libertarian think tank, is that the Labor Force Participation Rate fluctuation is noticeably more pronounced among lower educated workers, those being workers with less than a bachelors degree. This is an important statistic to take into account as a large pool of applicants for law enforcement agencies is the pool of individuals with only a high school diploma. 

Further, according to the U.S.  Bureau of Labor Statistics, using the same time frame (2011 to 2021) the number of job openings in the United States has been steadily increasing, other than a steep decline during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Since the steep decrease during the pandemic, the number of job openings has sky rocketed. 

Solution

At the macro level, the current environment is one in which police agencies are adding to their workforces while the pool of applicants is becoming smaller due to a number of factors including a drop in the labor force participation rate and an increasing number of job openings in other fields. How should law enforcement agencies combat these trends? The solutions put forth in this article are laid out in order as one solution will build on another.

The first solution would be for struggling law enforcement agencies too determine if they truly are understaffed. Do they truly not have enough officers to meet law enforcement needs, or are they operating under a staffing initiative from the past that says they should have a certain number of law enforcement officers, even though they are able to meet their communities law enforcement needs with the number of officers that they have. In that same vein, a way to help determine if a law enforcement agency is understaffed is to determine if the agency is operating as efficiently as possible. Are there sworn law enforcement officers acting in roles that could be filled by non sworn employee’s (quartermaster, grant writing, dispatch, parking enforcement, etc)? Are there sworn law enforcement officers acting in roles that could be taken over by new technological innovations? In the last article, it was shown that only 19% of Americans believe that law enforcement should be enforcing traffic laws. Perhaps more law enforcement agencies could deploy red-light and speed cameras to free up law enforcement officers.

If law enforcement agencies can determine if they are understaffed and operate as efficiently as possible, another solution would be to use excess funding that is allocated for law enforcement officer jobs that may be redundant to incentivize the positions that are critical and make those positions more appealing to a larger number of people, thus expanding the applicant pool. This can be done in a myriad of ways with two sticking out most prominently. The first is the most obvious and that would be to increase salaries. The second would be to use those excess funds to offer education reimbursement for college graduates that are leaving college with school loans. This would expand the applicant pool by making law enforcement more appealing to college graduates. 

Conclusion

Based on the information compiled in this article, there is not currently a crisis in law enforcement hiring. After compiling data from a multitude of different sources, it has been definitively proven that the number of law enforcement officers in the United States is not decreasing, it is increasing and has been increasing since at least 2011.

This article also shows that while there is not currently a crisis in law enforcement hiring, there may be one on the horizon. Economists opine about the changes that are coming with the retirement of the baby boomers, the largest generation by population in U.S. history and what that will do to the workforce. Law enforcement agencies need to be proactive about these coming challenges so that they are not caught off guard. Finding ways to make law enforcement officer positions more appealing to a wider portion of the population will serve them well. 

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