Police Staffing

The purpose of this special issue, The Police Staffing Crisis: Evidence-Based Approaches for Building, Balancing and Optimizing Effective Workforces, is to help unpack the dynamic staffing challenge, examine many of its component parts, and offer lessons to advance the science and practice of police workforce planning. It features work by global, thought-leading researchers and practitioners, many of whom collaborate on research and outreach as part of the Michigan State University Police Staffing Observatory (https://cj.msu. edu/research-excellence/pso/pso-home.html). While each of the 15…

Police agencies face myriad staffing challenges. Among these are changing preferences for police work, training officers for increasingly complex environments, diversifying police workforces to reflect the communities they serve, and ensuring officer wellness. Perhaps the most pressing of these, as reported by agencies themselves, is the need to maintain force levels by balancing recruitment and retention. Citing decreasing numbers of applicants and increasing numbers of retirements or other departures from the field, many police agencies report being understaffed. This, in…

Policing agencies in the United States and elsewhere continue to face staff shortages. Calls for greater diversity and different skills among police officers further complicate staffing efforts. Attempts to address these issues typically focus on recruitment and retention. This oversimplifies the problems and leads to piecemeal solutions. We draw on multiple threads of staffing research and field experience to highlight lessons for building effective police workforces. We illustrate the interconnected nature of staffing allocation, workload demand, performance objectives, staff supply…

This article discusses how a police agency can become a learning organization for recruitment. First, it reviews some recent issues and initiatives in recruiting. Second, it discusses recruiting in the context of becoming a learning organization. Third, it reviews how one agency has applied the principles of a learning organization to its own recruiting work. Finally, it identifies some lessons for agencies interested in applying principles of a learning organization. Read More

Police officer recruitment and selection are challenging, yet vitally important contributors to police accountability and establishing a trusted relationship with the community. To help police leaders make informed decisions, researchers at Michigan State University reviewed existing literature and compiled this guide to current resources on law enforcement staffing. The guide presents summaries of publications describing innovative strategies and rigorously tested recruitment and selection tactics in a format that is concise and accessible. All information is cross tabulated on an easy-to-read…

Difficulties in recruitment and retention undermine the ability of U.S. police departments to maintain and diversify their workforces, particularly in light changing workloads and performance expectations. The police reform movement and recent increases in crime have highlighted these challenges, but other systemic and acute issues have also made staffing departments difficult. Attention to police staffing has been sporadic and uneven, with much discussion focused on recruitment. Given increasing attrition and that retention is more efficient than recruitment, there is considerable…

Purpose – Policymakers have long suggested diversifying US police forces, which typically have white male majorities among officers. This article explores to what extent police diversity has changed over time in large agencies, as well as whether different diversity benchmarks may matter for agencies.Design/methodology/approach – The authors draw data from the Law Enforcement Management andAdministrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey for 358 agencies that had at least 100 full-time sworn officers in 1997 and 2016 and that reported officer demographic data to…

Police staffing challenges are both acute and systemic. Those seeking to address police staffing shortages, whether for one or many agencies, must ask, and have answered, some challenging questions about the actual work the agency needs to complete, its desired approach to accomplish it, and the extent to which it is doing so most efficiently. While personnel are critical to any organization, staff is only one way to address the workload of police agencies. This discussion has introduced some examples…

The purpose of this guidebook is to provide the law enforcement field with information about existing resources for promoting workforce diversity through a variety of staffing mechanisms. More specifically, it focuses on creating a pipeline of officers, marketing, selection, staffing for recruitment, mentorship, organizational climate, career progression, analysis and benchmarking, and substantive focus on women and race/ethnicity. It is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to promote awareness of research and professional publications that may not have been visible…

Communication is critical to the police workforce development process, from recruitment, selection and hiring to training, career progression and executive succession planning. To be sure, each stage requires unique forms of communication in terms of style, form, content, purpose and other attributes. Modestly, this chapter focuses on the first stage of recruitment. It aims to frame key aspects of the recruitment process and the importance of communication to them, highlighting roles, opportunities and challenges for both the organization and recruit.…