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nytimes.com
JUL 30, 2001
Urban Police Jobs Are Losing Their Appeal
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
olice departments in cities across the nation are facing what some call a personnel crisis, with the number of recruits at record lows, an
increasing number of experienced officers turning down promotions to sergeant or lieutenant and many talented senior officers
declining offers to become police chiefs, executive recruiters and police officials say.
Making the situation worse, in some cities a growing number of police officers are quitting for higher-paying jobs in suburban departments or
private businesses.
These problems have come at a time when crime is at its lowest levels since the late 1960's and the police should be feeling good about
themselves. But, the experts say, many officers from the lowest to the highest rank are questioning their occupation, tempted by higher pay in
the private sector after a decade- long economic boom and discouraged by seemingly constant public and news media criticism about police
brutality and racial profiling.
"I would absolutely not take a job as a police chief," said John Diaz, an assistant police chief in Seattle, who at 44 already has a good national
reputation and is sought after by recruiters for a chief's post.
"The politics of being police chief have become so insane no one wants the job," said Mr. Diaz, who is particularly attractive to recruiters
because he is Hispanic. "I work an 11- hour day, but our chief is here before me every day and doesn't leave until I'm gone, and all he gets is
attacked in the media all the time."
The malaise felt by those from potential police recruits to chiefs "is a major crisis all over the country," said Cynthia Brown, the publisher of
American Police Beat, the largest- circulation newspaper for law enforcement officers.
The difficulties are illustrated in her publication. Until a year ago, Ms. Brown said, she had never run an advertisement from a police
department looking for recruits, because police forces could still find all the applicants they needed in their own communities. But in the
current issue, there are advertisements for police recruits from a dozen cities, including Portland, Ore., and Seattle, and smaller cities like Santa
Cruz, Calif., and Sheridan, Wyo.
There has been little public attention to the police departments' troubles, but Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former
deputy police commissioner in New York City, said, "If this was a business, we'd be in a panic mode."
There are no nationwide statistics on the problem. But figures from several cities show the magnitude of the drop in applicants for the police
examination, the first step in becoming a police officer. In Chicago last year, 5,263 people signed up for the exam, despite months of recruiting
at college campuses, military bases and churches throughout the Midwest, said Cmdr. Bill Powers, the head of the Chicago police personnel
division. That is down from 10,290 people who signed up in 1997 and 36,211 applicants in 1991. Traditionally, only a tiny fraction of people
who apply are eventually accepted, making a large applicant pool important.
In New York City, more than 1,700 officers left the 41,000-member force last year through retirement or resignation, a third more than the year
before. The retirement rate is expected to accelerate, with concerns about morale and pay taking their toll and with a large portion of the force
soon to complete 20 years of service, when officers can retire with a full pension.
The number of captains leaving the New York Police Department tripled in the 2000 fiscal year from the year before, and over the next four
years, more than half of the force's 2,100 captains and lieutenants will be eligible to retire.
While the number of people signing up to take the test to become New York City police officers rose modestly this year over last year, the
overall number of applicants has dropped sharply in recent years. In 1996, 32,000 people signed up. This year, 13,136 did.
In Los Angeles, where the police have been buffeted by scandals since the Rodney King beating in 1991, there were only 19 recruits in the
police academy class in June, a record low, said Amira Smith, an officer in the employment opportunity development division. When Ms.
Smith joined the force four years ago, there were 70 recruits in her class, and not long before that there were 100 recruits per class. This month
Los Angeles canceled the police academy because there were not enough recruits.
In Seattle, the police department is having trouble finding officers to take the sergeants' examination, and sergeants to take the exam for
promotion to lieutenant. Only 86 officers took this year's sergeants' test, down from 134 in 1997, and only 10 sergeants took this year's exam
for lieutenant, compared with 33 in 1997, department figures show.
Many officers with seniority do not want to start over in a higher rank, risking having to work nights or weekends, officers say. And some
sergeants do not want the promotion because lieutenants, unlike sergeants, do not get overtime pay.
"There has been a big change in the culture of policing in the past few years, as lifestyle becomes more important than the sense of public
service," said Carroll Buracker, the head of a management and consulting firm in Harrisonburg, Va., and a former police chief in Fairfax County,
Va. Detectives in many police departments now work only from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, Mr. Buracker said, and therefore are
unavailable to contact a victim when a crime occurs in the evening or over the weekend.
"So why would a detective want to give up that work schedule when they have a family," he asked, "in order to be a sergeant without
seniority and face working nights and weekends?"
To attract and retain officers, some police departments are resorting to even more radical changes in the work week that Mr. Buracker, among
others, thinks undermine the goals of good policing. In Tacoma, Wash., all police officers work on Thursday, he said, so officers on a rotating
basis can get six days off in a row, from Friday through Wednesday. The new mayor of Los Angeles, James K. Hahn, won the endorsement of
the city's police union by promising to institute a three-day work week, with 12-hour shifts.
But if officers work only three days a week, Mr. Buracker said, they would often not be available to go to court, an essential duty in
everything from settling traffic tickets to felony trials. And they might start making fewer arrests to avoid having to show up to testify, he
said.
Attrition is a growing problem from New York to Los Angeles. In Detroit, where the police department is under a federal investigation for
charges that the police routinely violate citizens' civil rights, 600 to 700 officers have resigned in the last five years, according to department
figures, many to take better-paying jobs in suburban forces. In addition, more than 1,000 other officers have retired in the last five years, and
1,000 more are eligible to retire in the next two years, a large proportion of Detroit's 4,000-member department.
Low pay is often a factor. In Detroit, the starting salary for a police officer is $28,865; in Houston, it is $26,000.
In Miami, the police department has only 883 officers, well below its authorized strength of 1,045 officers. "Because of the economy, people
are not really interested in law enforcement as a career," said Sgt. David Ramras of the Miami police recruiting unit.
"We are not getting people coming out of the military," as police forces long did, Sergeant Ramras said. "It's easier for them to get a job
working with computers making a lot more money, with evenings and weekends off."
Sgt. John Rivera, the president of the Miami-Dade County Police Benevolent Association, offered another explanation. "This is increasingly
becoming a more miserable job by the day," Sergeant Rivera said. It has not helped, he said, that the Miami police have been stung by
accusations of abuse, corruption and cover-ups, and that the department is under investigation by federal prosecutors.
Most officers are good people, he said, "so to risk your life for increasingly ungrateful people isn't worth it."
The hardest part of the problem to quantify is the number of highly qualified senior police executives who are passing up offers to become
police chiefs, and as a result, the number of cities that are having to settle for their second or third choice. Among cities that have had
difficulty recently are Denver, Ann Arbor, Mich., Riverside, Calif., and Prescott Valley, Ariz., some recruiters and chiefs said.
"We are down about 35 percent in the number of qualified candidates when we do chief searches now," said Jerry Oldani, president of the
Oldani Group, a search firm in Bellevue, Wash.
"Up until five years ago, people broke their necks to be big city chiefs," Mr. Oldani said. "But now there are a lot of senior police officials who
just don't want to be chief."
There are several reasons for this, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization of police
executives that does recruiting and training. Pay for police chiefs is relatively low — from $70,000 to $150,000 — so low that some officers or
sergeants, with overtime, earn more than their bosses, Mr. Wexler said.
Chiefs usually cannot take their retirement benefits with them from job to job, unlike many corporate executives, and they face hardships in
relocating since cities do not offer the same help businesses do for their senior officers, Mr. Wexler said. Then there is the difficulty of going
through a public examination by the local city council, or civilian advisory bodies, so an applicant's whole life can suddenly appear in the
news media.
Moreover, Mr. Wexler said, "the expectations for chiefs are higher than ever, because of the new belief that chiefs can do something about
reducing crime."
So for a mayor, picking a police chief "has become like drafting a star quarterback," Mr. Wexler said, "but with these expectations, there is
danger, because you can't expect to get those crime drops forever."
"When people add up all these costs, it often isn't worth it to take a chief's job," Mr. Wexler said.
In Seattle last year, when the city was looking for a new chief in the aftermath of the violent demonstrations at the World Trade Organization
meeting, none of the assistant chiefs applied.
Mr. Diaz was one of those assistant chiefs. "It's really odd, because the usual route is to want to get promoted and become the head," he said,
"but being chief is a thankless job."
The eventual choice was Gil Kerlikowske, a former police commissioner in Buffalo.
Last Sunday, Chief Kerlikowske went out for a run from police headquarters and came across a crowd surrounding a woman who had passed
out — from a heroin overdose, it turned out. The chief, in his jogging gear, stopped to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then, when she
began to breathe again, took her to the hospital. Later, Chief Kerlikowske had to go to the hospital himself, for hepatitis B shots.
But on the evening news, Mr. Oldani said, the chief's good deed merited just a few seconds. The major item, he said, was about the police
chase of a stolen car, which struck a pedestrian, and the criticism that the police were to blame for the injured pedestrian.
"It's a good example of what's wrong," Mr. Oldani said. "He was being a good cop, and that just got lost." |
