Innovative approach needed to hire more police

The San Diego Police Department has struggled for years to keep officer staffing up to desired levels — and it’s been a losing battle.

Many traditional levers have been pulled to attract and retain officers, mostly through enhanced pay and benefits.

Police Chief David Nisleit recently made a pitch for the city to spend dramatically more money on recruiting and marketing efforts, along with bigger bonuses to entice officers from other departments.

Notably, Nisleit has recommended hiring more civilians to take on lowerlevel tasks and administrative work now performed by officers.

San Diego City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera has suggested taking a broader look at shifting some police duties to other municipal employees.

SDPD is not alone in its staffing problems nor in its efforts to deal with them. There’s something of a bidding war going on among police departments.

Chula Vista, Oceanside and San Diego are among local cities that offer bonuses for officers who sign up.

In January, National City approved a $30,000 hiring bonus for police academy graduates and officers from other law enforcement agencies, according to Tammy Murga of The San Diego Union-Tribune.

San Francisco last month began offering entrylevel officers an annual salary of more than $113,000, along with hefty signing bonuses.

Despite such moves, analysts are not predicting an end to police staffing woes anytime soon. In some quarters, the term “crisis” has been used after a wave of resignations and retirements in recent years, with many more anticipated in the near future.

The city of San Diego’s independent budget analyst said it could take years for the city to catch up on police staffing.

But the city recently hasn’t been meeting its recruiting and retention goals to do that. Retirements and other departures have outpaced new recruits and transfers from other agencies, according to David Garrick of The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Recent police academies have been operating at 20 percent to 30 percent below capacity because the department hasn’t been able to attract enough recruits, Nisleit told the City Council’s Budget Review Committee earlier this month.

In addition to the 201

officer vacancies, Nisleit said the department had 99 civilian vacancies and 24 dispatcher vacancies.

Years ago, SDPD relied more on non-officer personnel, but those ranks were trimmed amid the Great Recession of 2008. Then the city and department became intensely focused on hiring and keeping officers.

Elo-Rivera and other council members encouraged the department to go in the direction of more non-sworn positions, reiterating the difficulty SDPD will face in boosting its officer corps amid a national police staffing shortage.

“I’m not in any way dismissing the need to make sure we are adequately staffed,” Elo-Rivera said at the committee meeting. “What I’m trying to do is be realistic.”

Many reasons are given for police shortages. One issue San Diego had for years was that its officer pay fell behind that of other departments.

Police forces were also affected by the broader resignation trend that took hold during the coronavirus pandemic, and some officers said they moved on because they opposed vaccination mandates. Burnout was also said to be an issue, along with the potential dangers that come with the job.

Meanwhile, local governments were struggling to hire and keep workers across many departments.

At the same time, there was growing scrutiny of police and demand for increased accountability in the use of force and encounters with people of color.

The death of George Floyd in 2020 and other Black people at the hands of police led to some calls to “defund police.” That movement was not widely embraced and petered out.

But there was a less headline-grabbing discussion about “reimagining policing.” That concept focused on shifting funding from police departments to public health and social service agencies in hopes of addressing underlying issues that can contribute to crime, such as poverty, homelessness and mental health.

San Diego council members may or may not subscribe to all the particulars of “reimagining” policing, but they clearly seemed interested in a rethinking of how the Police Department operates to address staffing issues that don’t appear to be going away.

The main fallout from police staffing issues in San Diego has been increasing delays in response times to calls, particularly those that are less urgent, and increased overtime spending.

Yet despite all this, San Diego continues to be one of the safest large cities in the United States. Its violent crime rate of 4.1 per 1,000 residents is one of the lowest among major metropolitan areas.

San Diego traditionally has had a low officer ratio per capita compared with other cities. It didn’t even make the list of the 101 U.S. cities with the highest number of officers per 1,000 residents, compiled by City-Data.com

Washington, D.C., was tops with 6.1 officers per 1,000, Chicago had 4.4 and New York City had 4.2. Closer to home, San Francisco had 2.6 and Los Angeles had 2.4.

San Diego has about 1.12 officers per 1,000 residents — half what some police officials say it should be.

Not surprisingly, the relationship between police staffing and crime rates has been studied — and questioned.

“The number of officers in most big-city departments is the same as it was when crime was much higher in the late 2000s,” according to a report by

Bloomberg CityLab in January.

There may be different views of when the minimum police staffing threshold has been breached — except perhaps in Tehama County.

In what was depicted as the police version of a canary in the coal mine, the sheriff ’s office in the sparsely populated Northern California county suspended daytime patrols in November because of a staffing shortage. That made national news.

The patrols resumed in February, when the sheriff ’s staff was bolstered following a pay raise.