How Gov. Healey can help recruit more cops
The past few weeks have been very bad for the image and reputation of policing. A Washington Post-ABC poll found that trust and confidence in police officers dropped after explosive national news coverage of Memphis police officers savagely beating a young Black man. The high profile Cambridge police shooting of a young man with a knife has led to large demonstrations against the police. What young woman or man, after being subjected to the continuous flow of negative news about police misconduct, wants to join this profession? Not very many, which is why there is a serious shortage of new police officers in Massachusetts and throughout the country,
At the US Conference of Mayors
Annual meeting in Washington DC, there was a well-attended panel discussion on the crisis. Unfortunately, panelists, who included mayors and police leaders did a poor job of addressing how to turn this shortage around. These experts failed to understand that the shortage is a marketing and sales challenge. Unlike those who run hospitals and colleges, where sophisticated marketing campaigns are orchestrated to increase patient volume and student enrollment, police leaders do not understand how well designed marketing campaigns can help resolve the recruitment crisis.
A department sending out a news release on the next police entrance exam or a video featuring a middle-age officer talking about his job is not going to persuade the GenZ and millennial generations to consider policing as a career. A sophisticated marketing campaign for the policing profession in Mass. is needed more than ever if recruitment is going to be an issue of the past. Policing has got to sell the mission of law enforcement officers by communicating a positive and resonating narrative of their challenging duties and responsibilities.
Here’s how Governor Healey can help. First, the governor should request her Secretary of Public Safety to convene a policing recruitment summit. Law enforcement leaders representing police unions and their professional associations along with regional representation from urban and suburban police chiefs would meet with seasoned marketing leaders to design a six-month recruitment and image building campaign using market research, focus groups, strategic and persuasive visual and written messaging and key communications platforms designed to reach targeted recruitment demographics.
I am certain there are some marketing professionals who would offer their assistance pro bono or retired marketing experts who would volunteer their time for this assignment. A positive and statewide integrated marketing and branding campaign with a consistent series of sales and branding messages that are persuasive and motivational, aimed at a new generation of potential officers, is essential.
Gov. Healey should follow the lead of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s Police Recruitment and Retention program which provides $25 million to law enforcement to create marketing strategies that recruit and retain qualified police officers. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has taken a similar approach with his “Operation Bold Blue Line,” a statewide initiative which invests $13 million to help departments recruit and support police officers.
Addressing the image crisis impacting policing, Steven Sund, the former Chief of the US Capitol Police said, “there hasn’t been a profession so maligned and its members so publicly hated since GIs returned from the Vietnam war.” Action is needed now.