Can Healey help with police recruitment?

The past fewweeks 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 to death a young Black man.

Local news coverage has focused on the U.S. Department of Justice investigating the Worcester Police Department for excessive use of force and racial profiling, a scathing report charging a former suburban police chief of hiring untrained and unqualified officers, and the high-profile Cambridge police shooting of a young man with a knife that 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 Mass. and throughout the country,

At the U.S. Conference of Mayors Annual meeting in Washington, D.C., 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 around this officer shortage. 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 sophisticated marketing campaign for the policing profession in Massachusetts is needed more than ever if recruitment is going to be an issue of the past. Policing has got to aggressively counter the negative beating the profession is taking by the orchestration of a professionally designed image enhancement campaign which sells themission of law enforcement officers by communicating a positive and resonating narrative of their challenging duties and responsibilities.

Here’s how Gov. Maura 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 sixmonth recruitment and image building campaign usingmarket research, focus groups, strategic and persuasive visual andwrittenmessaging 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 whowould 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 andmotivational, aimed at a new generation of potential officers, is essential.

Healey can 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 $13million to help departments recruit and support police officers. And the Chicago Police Department clearly gets it by hiring a professional marketing (not pr consultant) agency to create a multi-level recruitment campaign that will lead to the hiring of 1,000 new officers.

Addressing the image crisis impacting the policing profession, Steven Sund, the former chief of theu.s. Capitol Police said, “There hasn’t been a profession so maligned and its members so publicly hated since GIS returned from the Vietnam war.”

With Gov. Healey’s help, a course correction can happen through a statewidemarketing campaign about this essential profession.

Billerica’s Rick Pozniak has spent decades designing award winning marketing and communications campaigns that changed perception, public opinion and behavior.