The State of Policing, Five Years After George Floyd

Editor's Note: This article appears in Governing's Spring 2025 magazine. You can subscribe here.

This is a great time to join the Seattle police force. New recruits receive a $7,500 signing bonus to supplement starting salaries in the six figures. Officers who transfer from other cities do even better, with starting pay at $116,000 and signing bonuses of $50,000. Seattle increased its police budget by 16 percent for the current year.

Like a lot of other big cities, Seattle has seen officers head out for smaller, quieter jurisdictions. It’s hoping that the substantial increase in pay will lead more of them to stick around, making the department “a career destination, rather than a stepping stone,” said Sue Rahr, who served as the interim chief until February. Last year, the department received more than twice as many applicants as it did in 2023. For the first time since 2019, it’s now hiring more officers than it’s losing, she told Governing.

All of this was practically unimaginable just five years ago. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, protests against police brutality and racial discrimination sprung up all across the nation and indeed much of the world. Anti-police feeling ran as strong in Seattle as anywhere, where protesters took to the streets by the tens of thousands. Activists established a six-block police-free zone. Several functions — including emergency management and victim advocacy — were shifted away from the police department. In 2021, the City Council approved a police budget of $355.5 million, a notable drop from the department’s $401.8 million budget two years earlier.
Officers voted with their feet, leaving the force with serious shortages. “The narrative just kept getting repeated over and over again — you don’t want to be a cop in Seattle because the local government doesn’t support you,” Rahr says. “There were many very loud activists in the community that were very anti-police. … We lost hundreds of cops and we had a very difficult time replacing them.”

The political atmosphere around policing has shifted significantly in the years since, and not just in Seattle. The spike in homicides and other violent crimes during the pandemic put a new focus on public safety. The slogan "defund the police" quickly proved politically toxic, blamed by many Democrats for some of the party’s losses in recent elections. Policies meant to curb the worst excesses of police activity, including bans on chokeholds and restrictions on qualified immunity from civil litigation, now are mostly dead letters. Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the Justice Department ordered a halt to consent decrees and settlement agreements that required changes in policy in departments with patterns of misconduct. In March, President Trump called for the death penalty for anyone who kills a cop.

But even if police departments are facing less criticism and enjoying strong political support, that doesn’t mean their challenges are all behind them. The most glaring problem is staffing. Despite its recruiting efforts, Seattle remains short by about 300 officers. Minneapolis has a vacancy rate of about 20 percent. Across the country, agencies are about 10 percent short of their budgeted workforce, according to a survey from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “We have gone from a period when there was some talk about defunding the police to where police departments have the money but they cannot hire,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit policy group.
Departments face pressures at both ends of the career ladder. College graduates are less likely to enter policing than their peers in decades past. Young people like remote work, which is generally not an option in law enforcement. Police “have to be out in the streets on holidays and at nights and in bad weather,” says Jim Burch, president of the National Policing Institute, a nonpartisan research group. “Compare that to a job that you can work from anywhere, making possibly twice as much.”

If recruiting new cops is hard, so is retaining officers toward the end of their careers. Hiring booms in the 1980s and 1990s are leading now to the exodus of a large cohort of cops. In Houston, more than 1 out of every 4 active officers are eligible to retire.

And it’s not just retirees who are leaving. Experienced officers have been departing larger jurisdictions for smaller cities they believe offer less bureaucracy, better hours and less public scrutiny. “If you work in a larger city, some situation happens with body-worn cameras and you’re on the nightly news,” Wexler says. “That’s probably not going to happen as much in a medium- to small-sized agency.”  

Workforce challenges like these are leading to a vicious circle. Agencies cope by assigning additional overtime hours to remaining officers. Last year, in New York, police worked so many extra shifts that the department burned through twice its overtime budget. The added stress prompts yet more officers to leave.

Meanwhile, the percentage of crimes that are solved — the so-called clearance rate — is anemic. More than half of murders and manslaughters were solved in 2022, but only about a quarter of rapes and robberies get resolved. That’s among crimes that are reported to police, which is less than half of the crimes that are actually committed.

Aside from crime, police today are expected to respond to incidents that stem from failures in the social safety net. “When I came into the field 45 years ago, we were not confronting so many people with acute mental illness and untreated addictions,” says Rahr, the former Seattle chief. In addition, “the presence of guns was not anywhere close to what it is now, so it’s a much harder, much more dangerous job now.”
Given recruiting problems in an era of low unemployment, departments are rethinking and in many cases streamlining their hiring processes. As is too often the case in the rest of government, it takes a long time to start working on a police force — up to a year in some cities. Some departments now move to bring people on board a lot faster, sometimes finding other work for them to do while background checks are completed.

More than 400 departments have pledged to do a better job of recruiting and retaining women, who make up just 12 percent of police nationwide. One study found that women will wait to apply until they meet 100 percent of the expected qualifications, while men will go ahead and sign up after matching just 60 percent of the requirements. In addition to encouraging more women to apply, more departments are trying to find equipment better shaped to fit women’s bodies and providing lactation rooms.Departments are also rethinking which qualifications are truly necessary. Some are recognizing that bans on tattoos cut against the grain of current preferences. And, while deafness might disqualify individuals as beat cops, it’s not a barrier to working in cybersecurity.

Agencies are also looking for areas where civilians can take the place of sworn officers, such as monitoring surveillance footage. And while an older generation of cops was trained to assume every call would take them to an active crime scene, younger recruits more often understand that they’ll work as de facto social workers, the go-to responders for people falling through gaps in social safety nets. A broader trend has been co-responder programs, which involve sending social workers or mental health specialists alongside sworn officers to respond to certain nonviolent incidents.
One recent studyof 568 police departments found that 41 percent of them ran co-responder programs. Some jurisdictions use alternative responders, meaning mental health workers respond without any police backup. But some policing experts worry that it's difficult to determine in advance which calls will be safe for alternative responders to tackle alone, and note that, while, social workers might be better than police at de-escalating situations, cops do handle millions of encounters without problem. “Often social workers will say, ‘We responded to X number of cases without a serious incident,’ because they’re skimming off the cream,” says Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Police wouldn’t have a problem with these people either.”

Still, just having uniformed cops show up can add stress to a situation. Although questions remain about which calls are safe for alternative responders to address without police backup, that’s not a unique circumstance. “We send EMTs to the scenes of dangerous situations all the time and they’re able to ascertain for themselves whether or not they need police backup,” says Charlotte Resing, of the Center for Policing Equity, which advocates for public safety policy changes meant to protect communities.

Last year, Gallup found that a majority of Americans expressed trust in the police — the largest year-over-year increase in confidence in any major institution and essentially the only one that saw upward movement. Trust in police is a bedrock requirement for fighting crime, since community cooperation is essential to solving so many cases. “One thing that’s come out of the last few years is a greater recognition on the part of law enforcement that the relationship we have with communities is, one, vitally important, and two, has to be respected and carefully managed,” says Burch of the National Policing Institute.
Establishing trust is a long-term process; losing it can happen in a flash. There are still instances where officers turn anodyne encounters into something dangerous — ultimately shooting individuals, for instance, who were initially stopped for a speeding violation. Police fatally shot a record number of people last year. A group called Mapping Police Violence found that officers have killed more people each year since 2019. Racial disparities remain stark. The share of Black people confronted or threatened with force actually increased from 2020 to 2022, the period of peak scrutiny following the murder of George Floyd.

Although many departments have instituted accountability measures including civilian review boards, what people care about most is police's effectiveness, Moskos says. “Do people feel safe when people leave the house?” he asks. “If they do, then the public in general is willing to cut police a lot of slack — perhaps too much slack in certain cases. But the focus has to be on preventing crime and violence and disorder.”

But at the same time that the public has high expectations from police, seasoned command staff are either retiring or transferring out of larger jurisdictions. Insufficient staffing is also changing what police can handle. In some cities, agencies are less likely to monitor traffic or respond to noise complaints, so they can focus their thin forces on serious crime instead. Some agencies have disbanded specialized units or reduced their staffing to free up officers for patrols. A few cities, including wealthy enclaves such as Santa Fe, N.M., and Beverly Hills, Calif., have reached the point where they’re hiring private security guards to supplement police.
According to data from the Council on Criminal Justice, homicides have been falling rapidly after their pandemic-era highs, while domestic violence and robbery numbers are below where they were pre-pandemic. But gun assaults, while declining, are higher than they were in 2019, while shoplifting keeps rising.

Regardless of the statistical evidence, Gallup found last October that a majority of Americans believe there’s more crime in their area than there’d been a year earlier. The share of Americans who said they’d be afraid to walk alone at night near their homes ticked down last year, but only after reaching a three-decade high in 2023.

Police so far seem to have won the political argument over whether they need to be curbed due to excessive force or racism. Not only Seattle but other cities including Austin that initially cut police funding are now offering rich bonuses in hopes of hiring more cops. But now that the political pressures have eased, police departments still have to take care of the basics: Figure out how to hire more cops and solve more crimes.