Where have all the police gone?
Cities like ours need more police, but few parents want their kids to become cops
Bob Schwartzwelder, Pittsburgh Fraternal Order of Police union president, has been talking about police staffing shortages since 2021. He’s called it “an absolute crisis.”
In his estimation just three years ago, it wouldn’t be long before the city didn’t have enough police officers patrolling the streets to reassure the public about their safety. He wasn’t wrong. On the night of Feb. 26, only 14 officers patrolled a city of 300,000 people.
The problem is not just Pittsburgh’s. Officers are leaving the force nationally at unprecedented rates. As NBC reported, “Officer resignations were up 47% last year compared to 2019 — the year before the pandemic and Floyd’s killing — and retirements are up 19%.” The International Association of Chiefs of Police reported that 2/3rds of police departments were not getting enough applications.
Many have offered pay raises and lowered standards for recruitment. It hasn’t worked. Why?
Because as more and more established officers leave active duty, fewer and fewer young people in the United States want to grow up to be police officers.
A lack of respect, but why?
Police jobs used to be family jobs. It was common for a police officer to be the child, or grandchild, of another officer. Particularly in Catholic communities, entire families would serve on the force. But nowadays, police officers are the first people to tell their children not to follow in their footsteps.
Calibre Press conducted a survey in 2015 that found four out of five officers “would not encourage their children to go into law enforcement.” And this was before the death of George Floyd and the “defund the police” movement.
The two main reasons were a “lack of public respect for the profession” and “media and/or political cynicism,” citing negative portrayals of police in both the news and entertainment. That’s from the police point of view.
What goes unmentioned is the reason for the lack of respect and negative portrayals: For the general public, the police simply aren’t the good guys anymore.
Xavi, a former police officer from the Philadelphia area who now works for Border Patrol in Texas, is actively discouraging his son from entering law enforcement. He asked that we withhold his last name for his own job safety, as is true for other people interviewed in this article.
“My dad [who is also a police officer] cannot believe I would tell his grandson to avoid the force; but I don’t know that I want him to be in such a corrupt system. No one walks in wanting to be a bad guy, but the system turns you into one. It can’t be helped,” he said in an interview.
“It’s a vicious cycle. No respect leads to low officer morale, which leads to more abuses of power, which leads to less respect, and so on, forever. Why would I want that for my kid?”’
A valid thought
I spoke with an attorney in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division who has worked with law enforcement at every level, and he echoed Xavi’s thoughts. Even in his nice suburban neighborhood, “There’s an inherent distrust, an undertone. People think police officers are [jerks].”
“And as someone who has interacted with police extensively, I can say that that thought is validated. Even the best of them are stuck in a system. I saw first-hand the need for many reforms. A lot of officers are good people trying to do the best they can, but, again, it’s a systemic issue,” he added.
An acquaintance from Texas who does not share my politics in any way, and who is both in the military and a member of the military police, responded “hell no!” to my inquiry. “There’s so much antipolice sentiment out there. I get dirty looks at half the social events I go to — mostly from liberals. I don’t want my daughter to feel like an outcast.”
Maybe this is one reason the face of police-work has changed. I spoke with an admissions officer at an elite university, and he pointed out that until 1995, it was normal to see police recruiting at four-year college job fairs. Nowadays, most police recruit from community colleges in working-class and immigrant-heavy communities.
Of the 80 people that responded to an informal poll I posted online, either directly below the question or messaging me for anonymity, only two enthusiastically said they wanted their children to become police officers. Both of them were recently arrived immigrants, who believed that police work was an honest ticket to the middle class.
This presents an interesting conundrum: Police jobs are well-paid enough to be seen as vehicles into financial respectability, but cultural views and public disrespect have made it difficult for police to function without distrust from polite, upper-middle-class communities.
There are only so many nights police can remain understaffed in a city this size before their numbers are stressed. We need to make policing an appealing job.
It’s not the disrespect
For Xavi, the public perception argument falls flat. He does believe that policing in this country needs to begin anew — but not because of disrespect.
“There have always been bad cops in movies, on television, in detective books. It’s not public opinion, that’s not why I am talking my son out of joining. If you care about what people think so much, then you really shouldn’t become a cop,” he said.
“I just don’t want my kid to grow up to become a jerk.” And then he repeated it, using a much stronger word than “jerk.”