This is a great time to join the Seattle police force. New recruits receivea $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 awayfrom 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.

David Kidd
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. Minneapolishas a vacancy rate of about 20 percent. Across the country, agencies are about 10 percent short of their budgeted workforce, according to a surveyfrom 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.

VDB Photos / Shutterstock
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, inNew 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 solvedin 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. “The presence of guns was not anywhere close to what it is now, so it’s a much harder, much more dangerous job now.”

More than 400 departmentshave pledged to do a better job of recruiting and retaining women, who make up just 12 percent of police nationwide. Onestudy 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 equipmentbetter shaped to fit women’s bodies and providinglactation 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.

EB Adventure Photography / Shutterstock
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.

Shutterstock
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 areless likelyto monitor traffic or respond to noise complaints, so they can focus their thin forces on serious crime instead. Some agencies have disbandedspecialized 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.

Shutterstock
Regardless of the statistical evidence, Gallupfound 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 whosaid 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.