Dearth of officers is state’s most pressing police issue
You wouldn’t know it by watching news about police-community conflict, or tracking state legislation on the use of force by law enforcement. But California’s biggest problem when it comes to policing remains the same: There isn’t enough of it. Issues of police misconduct are serious, as stories from the racist police texts in San Francisco to the shooting of an unarmed homeless man in L.A. make plain. But underlying these issues is the fact that California lacks the manpower necessary for the smart, effective policing of our diverse, complicated communities.
California has long been distinguished by its sparse policing, with small police departments unable to keep pace with population growth in vast cities. But in recent years, police shortages around the state have become significantly worse. In San Diego, the police department has 300 fewer officers than a decade ago, and half the current force of 1,800-plus officers is eligible for retirement by 2017. The Fresno Police Department has seen a decline of more than 100 officers over the past decade. Los Angeles, after years of work mostly associated with former Chief Bill Bratton, reached its goal of 10,000 officers two years ago — and then immediately started slipping, as it struggled to find enough qualified people to replace retiring and departing officers.
In Oakland, with its notoriously high robbery rates, the police force has lost nearly a quarter of its sworn officers since 2009. And San Jose may offer the bleakest picture for police staffing. That sprawling city of 1 million people now has fewer than 1,000 street-ready officers; some projections show the number dropping below 900 by the middle of next year.
The impacts of such declines are seen in more than slower response times and in departments’ inability to investigate crimes like burglary. Cops also have less time to develop deep relationships within the neighborhoods they cover.
“I think we all know that Oakland is very short on police, that it's a very urgent need.” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, whose new budget promises 40 new officers, is shown above with Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent
Breakdowns in police-community relations are an inevitable result.
Nearly as many reasons are given for this decline as there are cops. Tight budgets during the recession. A surge in retirements of Baby Boomer officers. The difficulty of finding enough qualified candidates. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that lured away military personnel who might have been cops. The bigger salaries available to cops who work in the growing private security sector.
“The pool of qualified applicants out there is utterly dismal,” Salinas Police Chief Kelly McMillin told the Washington Post last year. “We’ve lost 25 percent of our sworn staff since the recession, in a department that was desperately understaffed at our highest, facing a community plagued by violence.” The result, the chief said: just 11 officers patrolled the city of 154,000 on the average day shift. “It’s one of the lowest ratios in California, and therefore the lowest ratio in the country, because nobody has fewer cops than California.”
In California, there is another factor. The high salaries and generous pension benefits of police make employing cops an exceptionally expensive endeavor; the costs of retiree benefits in California cities are crowding out other local services.
Of course, some might ask: With the historic decline in crime, who needs police?
That question is answered powerfully by Jill Leovy, a Los Angeles Times reporter, in her new book, “Ghettoside.” In a different spin on “Black Lives Matter,” Leovy shows how we have too little enforcement of the law, particularly where black men live, with the failure to punish murderers creating “impunity” that produces more violence.
There is a strong connection, she writes, between this failure and the complaints about police abuses. “The perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”
In this context, the 20-plus state legislative proposals to put more restrictions on cops — body cameras, changes in prosecution of deadly force cases — amount to treating symptoms of the policing disease, not its root causes. Far more urgent is the challenging work of rebuilding California’s police departments so we have enough good cops on the beat, with the time and resources to focus on the fundamental work of preventing violence.