Research

This PSO Perspective summarizes and extends lessons from our research, “Reframing the Police Staffing Challenge: A Systems Approach to Workforce Planning and Managing Workload Demand,” appearing in Vol. 18 of Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. It highlights the advantages and disadvantages of referring to the current police staffing situation as a crisis, and how, by instead considering it a dynamic challenge, a systems approach offers evidence-based guidance for addressing it. Read More

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…