Police departments enlist wookiees to help fill ranks

AUSTIN, Texas — A recruiting video from the Fort Worth Police Department features a look-alike of Star Wars’ Chewbacca. Gimmicky? Perhaps. But it’s gotten nearly 3 million views online and the department believes it’s helped recruit as many as 50 officers.

In Florida, the Clearwater Police Department hopes to entice potential job candidates with a video that plays at outdoor concerts, this one pitching the coastal region’s surf, sandy beaches and majestic sunsets.

And in Houston, where law enforcement agencies have been steadily losing officers, Harris County Sheriff ’s Office deputies drive vehicles inscribed with an online address to attract potential recruits.

Police departments across the country are scrambling to fill their ranks. The loss of tens of thousands of officers over the past decade has compromised effectiveness and imposed greater demands on those still on the job, according to police officials and outside experts.

“It makes it much more difficult,” said Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, a coalition of unions and associations representing 241,000 police officers across the country. “From the public’s point of view, it’s a risk to public safety, because you have fewer officers out there to respond to calls.”

Among the causes of the officer shortage: a rash of retirements by senior officers from the baby boomer generation, better-paying jobs in the private sector, a robust economy with low unemployment rates and, in many cases, grievances over salary and morale. There is also the “Ferguson effect,” a reference to the St. Louis suburb that in 2014 exploded in a dayslong protest over the shooting of an AfricanAmerican teenager by a white police officer.

The U.S. Justice Department later determined that the officer in Ferguson had acted in self-defense. But that incident and others involving white officers shooting unarmed AfricanAmericans have fueled antipathy toward the police, especially in minority communities.

Potential applicants might think twice before plunging into a profession that could subject them to scorn, law enforcement officials say. Police officers now feel they are being perceived as “the new bad guy,” according to a 2016 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

“When you got into this career in our day and age, it was a very popular profession,” says Clearwater Police Chief Dan Slaughter, who has been a policeman for more than a quarter-century.

Now, he says, an undetermined number of potential recruits are being “scared away” by a changed environment.

Then there are the dangers of the job: Being an officer means facing the prospect of death or injury on any given day. On-duty law enforcement deaths totaled 144 in 2018, a 12 percent increase over the previous year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. In Texas alone, four Houston police officers were shot and wounded in late January. Five Dallas officers were killed in an ambush in 2016.