Colegio de los Ángeles #5

Laura Carolina Hernández Betancurt Grammar 11° 25-12-2022

As Applications Fall, Police Departments Lure Recruits With

Bonuses and Attention
Many police chiefs say staffing levels have not rebounded from a wave of resignations that started
with the pandemic and the 2020 unrest.

WASHINGTON — As American police departments seek to overcome an exodus of disgruntled

officers and a sudden decline in applications, they are wooing recruits with some of the tactics a
football coach might use to land a prized quarterback.

In Fairfax County, Va., in the suburbs of Washington, future officers are being treated to a “signing
day” ceremony where they formally accept their job offers.

Out-of-state residents who want to join the police force in Louisville, Ky., are being flown in to take
entrance tests, put up in a hotel and paired with an officer for a ride-along.

On the West Coast, some agencies are offering bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars to lure
officers from other departments to transfer.

The economics of law enforcement were long tilted in favor of police departments, which often
had far more qualified applicants than they did job openings. No longer. A steep drop in the
number of people wanting to become police officers since the start of the pandemic and the
unrest of 2020 have given extraordinary leverage to job seekers, forcing departments to market
themselves in new ways.

“The game has clearly changed,” said Marcus Jones, the police chief in Montgomery County, Md.,
who said he discovered that another department was using location-based digital advertising to
target the area around his police stations with job postings.

Calls to radically revamp policing and divert resources to other agencies, heard in protests
nationwide after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, have since cooled. But police chiefs say they
are still contending with the fallout from those months.

At a recent conference in Washington held by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law
enforcement policy organization, officials from departments across the country said they were
struggling. They said they were not finding enough people willing and able to fight crime, staff
unfilled shifts and build residents’ trust in the police.
“I need an officer that’s literally going to be the community outreach officer, but also can respond
to that active shooter,” said Chief Adrian Diaz of the Seattle police. His department lost hundreds
of officers after the unrest of 2020, which in his city included a so-called autonomous zone and a
police station that the department vacated for weeks.
Colegio de los Ángeles #5
Laura Carolina Hernández Betancurt Grammar 11° 25-12-2022

Chief Diaz said that many officers who left felt unappreciated by politicians and residents,
especially at a time when “Defund the Police” became a staple of political discourse. Some of the
departing officers accepted signing bonuses to join departments in the suburbs; others fled the
profession entirely. Though Seattle now offers a $30,000 bonus of its own for officers serving
elsewhere who transfer to the city, as well as a $7,500 signing bonus for new recruits, Chief Diaz
said recruiting is still proving difficult. New police officers in Seattle earn about $83,000 annually
once they graduate from the academy, while experienced officers transferring earn more than
$90,000 a year to start.

The officer shortages are happening during a larger reordering of the American economy. Low
unemployment rates, ample job openings and a proliferation of remote work have emboldened
people in many fields to seek better pay, new career paths or more time off to spend with family.
And within policing, many departments were already facing a crush of officers nearing retirement
age.

MAIN IDEA

The article talks about the suburbs of Washington, future officers are being treated to a signing
day ceremony where they formally accept their job offers. On the West Coast, some agencies are
offering bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars to lure officers from other departments to
transfer. The economics of law enforcement were long tilted in favor of police departments,
which often had far more qualified applicants than they did job openings.
A steep drop in the number of people wanting to become police officers since the start of the
pandemic and the unrest of 2020 have given extraordinary leverage to job seekers, forcing
departments to market themselves in new ways.

POINT OF VIEW

I think that the game has clearly changed, the police chief in Montgomery County, Md. Calls to
radically revamp policing and divert resources to other agencies, heard in protests nationwide
after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, have since cooled. But police chiefs say they are still
contending with the fallout from those months. At a recent conference in Washington held by the
Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy organization, officials from
departments across the country said they were struggling.

I need an officer that’s literally going to be the community outreach officer, but also can respond
to that active shooter, said Chief Adrian Diaz of the Seattle police. His department lost hundreds of
officers after the unrest of 2020, which in his city included a so-called autonomous zone and a
police station that the department vacated for weeks.