In early 2009, Congress appropriated $1 billion for the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), for the COPS Hiring Recovery Program to help stabilize law-enforcement positions. The COPS office received a staggering 7,272 applications for this program requesting $8.3 billion to support more than 39,000 sworn-officer positions throughout the United States (COPS, 2009a). These statistics highlight two glaring facts: The need for police officers is great, yet the ability to support the officers is limited.

While recent recessionary conditions have mitigated some of these problems for some agencies, others report staffing shortages (a few even...

Diminishing sources of recruitment, increasing causes for attrition, and broadening police responsibilities all shape questions of workforce supply and demand. To conceptualize and delineate the distinct forces at work, we use the metaphor of a bucket (Figure 2.1). In this metaphor, the size of the bucket represents the absolute need or demand for police officers, which will vary by agency based on workload determinants and service objectives.

The water inside the bucket represents the current level of police strength. The water level varies over time with accession and attrition and frequently does not fill the bucket because the demand for...

“Our people are our most important asset” is a frequently used phrase in police management. This saying magnifies why employee turnover is an important issue facing police organizations. Crucial issues related to employee turnover include its consequences for an organization, what it indicates about organizational health and functioning (e.g., the efficiency of personnel management and planning), and the changing nature of modern-day policing. In this chapter, we place issues of police turnover in context by examining what is known about retaining officers, as well as experiences from other fields that might support different approaches to officer retention.

Turnover occurs when...

Throughout the 2000s, police-officer recruitment has concerned police executives and administrators from agencies of varying size and locale. Early in the decade, the nation’s largest agencies, including those in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, reported problems recruiting qualified applicants (Butterfield, 2001). Half of all agencies and two-thirds of those serving at least 50,000 residents also reported staffing problems stemming from a lack of qualified applicants (Koper, Maguire, and Moore, 2001). In 2004, California police chiefs identified recruitment and retention as their second-most pressing issue, trailing only funding (California Police Chiefs Association, 2004) and reflecting concerns of earlier years (California...

In some ways, recruitment and retention are more of an art than a science. Empirical evidence on what appear to be promising practices is often lacking. Nevertheless, in concluding this work, we note several practices we have discussed that can affect multiple areas of recruitment and retention—and perhaps be of greatest promise to police agencies. Table 5.1 groups these practices into five categories, as presented earlier, and cites some relevant research on each. In this chapter, we also discuss the potential benefits and difficulties in them.

The benefits ofplanning and analysiscan include understanding the depth and nature of...