In Brief:
The Miami Police Department has had 809 applicants on their police officer recruitment list this year. A decade ago, they would’ve had that many applicants on the first day.
Law enforcement — along with many other fields in the public sector — has struggled to hire enough staff. While 2023 saw staffing increases after years of decline, police departments around the country continue to see shortages in critical areas.
For many younger Americans, becoming a police officer is no longer an appealing career path. They may shy away from policing for a variety of reasons. For some, the image of police has taken a hit due to high-profile shootings. Others express financial concerns, while many young people have expectations that law enforcement cannot meet, such as remote work. “The risk associated with being a police officer outweighs the benefits," says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum — at least for some people when other jobs can offer comparable pay for far less risk.
Although small and medium-sized departments are rebounding, big cities continue to struggle, Wexler notes. Seattle has only been able to hire half as many people as the number of officers who have retired this year. In Los Angeles, a city that has a historically understaffed police department, Chief Dominic Choi says he has just under 9,000 officers, leaving him 25 percent short of the 12,000 needed to be “well-staffed."
“I think it has made it more difficult to respond to all types of calls,” Choi said. “Where we’re seeing some slippages are nonemergency calls. We’ve seen that number go from an average response time of 20 minutes upwards to 40 minutes, up to an hour.”
Not a New Problem
The law enforcement workforce shortage is not new but shortages became a bigger problem in 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak and the nationwide anti-police protests that sprang up after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. "It's impossible to disentangle those two things," says Ben Grunwald, author of A Large-Scale Study of the Police Retention Crisis.
COVID-19 in particular reshaped the landscape of policing. For one thing, the pandemic triggered, or at least coincided with, a spike in homicides and other crimes. Grunwald notes that officers were not only constantly exposed to people with the virus, but to “a new population of people that were more difficult to deal with on a regular basis," due to shifting attitudes toward police and the rise in behavioral health challenges.
What might once have been an attractive career option, offering solid pay and benefits, has become less appealing, says Jack McDevitt, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University. “People don’t see themselves as wanting to be police officers,” he says.
Increased skepticism toward police in some quarters, notably among people of color, mean fewer people from those communities see law enforcement as a desirable way to make a living, McDevitt says.
The shift away from policing as a career is also generational. Although Gen Z's trust in police has grown — climbing from 27 percent to 43 percent between 2023 and 2024 —younger people just aren’t signing up the way they once did. That leaves departments trying to figure out how to recruit them.
“Getting into law enforcement is a young person’s game,” Grunwald says. “The vast majority of new law enforcement officers are young, in their 20s.”
Even when young adults in college express support for law enforcement, it doesn’t always translate to them entering the field. Sherry Skaggs, a criminologist at the University of Central Arkansas, sometimes speaks to college freshmen about this. They bring up their financial concerns.
“This is not a financially lucrative field,” Skaggs says. “When you’re dealing with young people who probably have student loans that are paying for their college, they need something post-graduation that’s probably going to pay a little bit more.”
The median salary for police officers is around $72,280, but rookie officers generally make less. Many younger workers also want to place limits on the amount of time that they spend on the job. That means choosing jobs where they work shorter shifts or have less overtime. “Their free time is more important than monetary compensation,” Wexler says.
Policing often requires overtime. While some officers will appreciate the extra pay, it could drive other, younger officers to look for other jobs. ”It keeps mayors and city managers up at night as to who will be the next generation of police officers,” Wexler says.
Possible Solutions
Some issues are fixable. One thing that could help would be shortening the time frame between applying and hiring. It can take from six months to a year to get hired as an officer. Wexler says departments are looking at ways to reduce the lag.
In Florida, departments are offering additional financial incentives, giving out nearly 5,000 bonuses of $5,000 each in the last two years.
Skaggs says that improving community relations is key. Departments need to make connections with potential recruits and offer them support from day one.
“We need to make that initial stage of the hiring process more personal,” Skaggs says. “There’s something to be said, in today’s day and age, for doing more work on going to your potential applicants, rather than expecting them to come to you.”
