Memphis police force struggling to fill ranks

Residency rule won’t be on ballot

When Memphis residents go to the polls on Nov. 6, they’ll have some critical decisions to make, but deciding whether Memphis police officers should live within Shelby County will not be one of them following a decision made by the Memphis City Council on Tuesday.

A 7-6 council vote to strike the residency requirement referendum from the ballot followed hours of debate about the future of policing in Memphis, and drew a sharp rebuke from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland on social media.

The council decision leaves Memphis Police Department Director Michael Rallings, and the city’s director of human resources, Alex Smith, with the same problem they already had — achieving a net gain in officers.

“Yesterday, particular members of the Memphis City Council refused to allow the citizens of Memphis to vote on residency and possibly clear the path for the removal of a hurdle that is impacting public safety,” Rallings said in a statement. “While I am disappointed in their vote, I am yet still committed to hiring qualified and compassionate people who choose to serve our community,” Rallings said.

And while the new suggested number of 2,800 MPD officers — a number drawn from research by Strategic City Solutions — was the subject of council debate on Tuesday, the debate centered on one piece of the larger picture of MPD recruiting — held during a moment of

time where calls for redirecting funding from police forces into community resources is active in Memphis and the rest of the nation.

Outpacing attrition has been a challenge for some time already

Over the last few years, the ideal number of MPD officers suggested has varied. In a 2017 podcast, Rallings told Just City, the Memphis-based organization that centers its work around criminal justice reform, the ideal number of commissioned officers was 2,500.

In 2018, Bill Gibbons with the Memphis Shelby County Crime Commission expressed enthusiasm that Memphis would reach 2,300 officers by the year 2020. At the time, Gibbons said a $6 million infusion of cash from the private sector into MPD would help with recruitment and retention efforts.

But, currently, in 2020, MPD is just shy of 2,100 officers, in spite of a revamped “Best in Blue” recruiting campaign. On average, MPD loses 125 officers a year from a combination of retirement, resignations and terminations, according to the city’s director of human resources, Alex Smith.

MPD has recruited heavily from the Memphis and Shelby County market in the last four years, Smith said. Efforts to recruit in cities and college campuses elsewhere has increased as well, out of necessity, as Smith says it’s possible the local pool of willing police officers has already been exhausted.

And of the residents willing to sign on as an MPD recruit, some have to be counted out due to past legal issues often accrued as young adults. To restore the pipeline from high school to recruit, the Blue Path program was formed, and the Public Safety Technician course was resuscitated in 2016. “The reason why we created these programs was in part out of goodwill, but also because we have a 44% failure rate during the recruitment process,” Smith said. “We wanted to approach a younger audience before they make mistakes that would disqualify them from becoming a police officer.” Since restarting the public safety technician program in 2016, 128 public safety technicians have become police officers, just slightly over the amount of MPD officers lost in one year.

The other solutions sans lax residency requirements, out of town recruitment, hasn’t yielded huge returns either. The most recent class of recruits was 46 total, with 12 candidates coming in from out of town, Smith said.

One will be to continue the work of the relocation program, Smith said. Currently, the relocation program is funded through the city’s budget, a $5,000 stipend is given to recruits for relocation expenses. All told, Smith said roughly 10% of recruits were out-of-town candidates. “Absent politics, I’m looking at this from a pure recruiting perspective,” Smith said. “Whether you’re IT or Fedex, or any large organization that needs to recruit in volume, what you want is the ability to have access to as many strong candidates as possible. That’s why 18 of the 20 major cities I showed (to council) today in my presentation have either repealed or dropped their residency requirements drastically, because they are competing against other agencies.” Smith’s presentation to city council also makes a case for the city increasing salaries in order to retain officers. A slide presented shows MPD officers are currently paid about 9% less than their peers in some cities. Another obstacle is the eventual restoration of retiree benefits.

“We have 300 police officers eligible to retire today,” Strickland told The Commercial Appeal. “You give them health insurance for retirement and they’re fully vested in their pension, we can see a huge drop, you could lose two to 300 officers within a six-month period.” When asked if Memphis would see the ranks of MPD swell to 2,800, Strickland was not optimistic.

“Even if we relax residency, I don’t think that’s realistic. It’s gonna have to take the next mayor to do that,” Strickland said.

HENRY TAYLOR / THE LEAF-CHRONICLE A Memphis Police Officer leans against a squad car while a line of protesters passes a corner at downtown in Memphis on May 29.