A Note on Police Reform
A couple weeks ago I got a long, thoughtful email from a law man explaining that when we talk about “police reform” we’re reducing to shorthand a subject that is incredibly complicated. I want to share his thoughts with you, but he asked me to keep his name out of it, so we’ll just call him Jonah Hex:
I am a peace officer who was in uniformed patrol for the last twelve years before transitioning to a weird, specialty law enforcement job (at a great time, too!) that has given me time to reflect upon patrol work. It’s like waking up slowly from a strange dream.
There is a widespread assumption that police administrators would fire incompetent officers if not for the powerful police unions. This is . . . an incomplete picture at best. It’s almost impossible to generalize about policing in America. In California, where I work, police officers make a good middle-class income. I have a friend who worked for New Orleans PD who told me they started at $17/hr, and he knew cops who were single moms who were on food stamps. In the same way, police unions have a wide range of sway over police administrators in different parts of the country.
There are incentives for police administrators to retain incompetent officers that have nothing to do with unions. A police department is a hungry beast that needs to be fed cops regularly. When economic times are good, no one wants to be a police officer. There is better money to be made without the lifestyle downsides that come with police work. Inevitably, departments start to drop well below their “minimum” staffing. In my area, many departments are 25-30% below minimum. I know of one big-city division that used to staff 9 officers on patrol. The minimum staffing was revised down to 6 due to the general lack of cops. When people are sick or on vacation, they will go as low as 4. Needless to say, their response time isn’t stellar.
I saw this dynamic play out during my career. When I was hired, shortly before the mortgage meltdown, people thought I was crazy to go into policing. I was able to land a job with my preferred agency, but I would have been able to get a position elsewhere. My agency paid my way through the academy and supplied all of my equipment. While there weren’t as many candidates due to the good economy, my agency was still able to be choosy as it was nearly fully staffed.
Once the Great Recession hit, there was a sudden interest in policing. My agency had its pick of candidates who had put themselves through the academy. The overall quality of candidates improved. When the rare lemon was hired, I witnessed unsuitable trainees getting fired during training for poor performance.
The latest economic boom coincided with a shortage of officers due to a previous hiring freeze. The quality and depth of the applicant pool was greatly diminished, and we were in the midst of a large wave of retirements.
By this point, I was a training officer. I saw my recommendations to remove unsuitable trainees for performance that had been unacceptable to that point ignored. The attitude of the command was that—barring any illegal behavior—trainees could be “fixed” later. This proved overly optimistic. It is very difficult to fix poor character or decision making.
I understand the administration’s quandary. They need cops. It takes about 9 months from the time of a retirement until a trainee is in the academy. Our academy is 6 months. My agency had an extra-long, nearly 6 month field-training phase. So after almost 2 years, to be told the appropriately $100,000 spent on hiring and training this person-who you hand picked was all for naught? That is a bitter pill to swallow. The sunk-cost fallacy is overwhelming at that point.
All of this goes back to what I wrote at the beginning of this movement following the killing of George Floyd: We have a number of overlapping problems and solving them requires identifying them, disentangling them, addressing them individually.
One more note of interest from Jonah Hex:
COVID has had an impact in cop world. The Officer Down Memorial Page tracks line-of-duty deaths. I often used it with my trainees to show them that cars were as dangerous as guns to cops. Here is the current year page: .
There are currently 82 COVID deaths listed. Last I checked, there were no NYPD deaths listed, but about 30 NYPD cops have died from COVID. These are duty related. I know of two Riverside County, CA deputies who died of COVID the same week. Only one was duty related, and that is the only one listed on ODMP. For perspective, 145 officers died in 2019. If you take 5/12 of that (equal to the pandemic so far) that is about 60. COVID has far more than doubled the risk of being a cop.
Given the impact on older officers, I predict a lot of extra retirements this year. When policing is slightly less popular than a violent bout of food poisoning, I don’t see a lot of volunteers to take their places.
The idea that COVID could kill more officers in the line of duty this year than all other causes of death is pretty striking.
Also striking: After this year, think about the kind of people who would really want to become cops. I can think of two general types: Those who want to fix law enforcement and those who like what they’ve seen.
I suspect the latter group might be larger than the former.