Police agencies investigate ways to fill uniforms

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Police departments around the country are contending with a shortage of officers and trying to lure new applicants with signing bonuses, eased standards, house down payments and extra vacation time.

From this seaside Southern California city to the Washington, D.C., suburbs, more than 80 percent of the nation's 17,000 law-enforcement agencies have vacancies.

"I was just at a conference of police chiefs," said William Bratton, the chief of police in Los Angeles, which has 720 openings. "It was all everybody was talking about."

Police officials and researchers say a confluence of demographic changes and social trends have caused the shortage. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have siphoned off public-service-minded people to the military. Hundreds of law-enforcement officers have handed in their badges to take higher-paying positions in the booming homeland-security industry.

And each year an increasingly large number of baby-boomer officers retire.

The labor pool in the next generation is smaller, further cutting the number of prospective applicants.

The younger generation is better educated than its predecessor, so a career in policing, where the average starting salary is $32,000, is not as attractive as it was before.

Prince William, Fairfax and Loudoun counties in Virginia all have recently instituted programs — signing bonuses, bounties for county employees recommending successful candidates, and pay increases — designed to keep their police departments intact. Prince George's County, Md., began a $1 million ad campaign last summer touting police work as exciting and challenging in the hope of boosting its chronically understaffed ranks.

Elsewhere, departments have dropped their zero-tolerance policy on drug use and past gang association, eased restrictions on applicants with bad credit ratings, and tweaked physical requirements to make room for more female candidates or smaller male candidates, police officials said. Departments also offer crash courses in reading and remedial English for the written parts of the entrance exam, and provide strength and agility coaches for the physical part — all of which have raised concerns about how qualified some of the new personnel will be.

"We no longer say if you've smoked marijuana five times, you can't be in the LAPD," said Cmdr. Kenneth Garner, who runs recruitment for the department. "If we did that, I'd be sitting in this office by myself. But we really take a hard look at honesty."

In the past, some recruitment drives have resulted in questionable hiring. In 1989 and 1990, the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, seeking to quell a crime wave, mistakenly hired numerous gang members and people with substantial criminal histories and drug and credit problems. Some were later implicated in questionable police shootings.

Experts said that while they hope the inherently conservative nature of law-enforcement agencies will protect against a slew of bad hires, there is a concern that with a smaller pool of applicants, less-qualified people are becoming police officers.

Tough decisions

"The question is, do we keep our radio cars empty or hire people who a few years ago we wouldn't have hired? It is very problematic," said Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a law-enforcement advocacy group in Washington.

To fill the void, police recruiters are fanning out across the country. When layoffs were announced in the automotive industry in Detroit, recruiters flocked there to try to sign up assembly-line workers. Police recruiters comb the beaches of Florida, California and Texas during spring break and conduct ad campaigns at a level unprecedented in the history of U.S. policing.

In Texas, the need for law-enforcement officers is so great that Dallas, Austin and Houston are in the midst of a bidding war to hire veteran officers, with Houston recently upping its bonus to $7,000.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, one of the country's more aggressive recruiters, recently drew the line on tattoos, branding and body piercing — but left some wiggle room. If the body art can be covered by a long-sleeved shirt and pants, then applications are still welcome.

In past decades, police departments were hampered by budget cuts. But now, even when there is adequate funding, cities can't find enough cops. In 2004, voters in Oakland, Calif., approved a $9 million tax increase to hire 63 additional officers. Today the city is nowhere close to meeting its recruitment goal because there are not enough suitable applicants.

"People are not as equipped or as inclined to be police officers as in the past," said Barbara Raymond, who has researched the police shortage for Rand Corp. "There's more drug use, there's a more sedentary lifestyle. People are more in debt and overweight."

Problem widespread

"What you are really talking about is a major national shortage in a variety of sectors — teachers, firefighters, nurses and police officers," said Williams, the Police Foundation president.

"Corporate America can move across the world to find people to work in its factories. But there are some things that you can't outsource."