It is a dangerous confluence of developments: Police forces in many major US cities are having to deal with a growing number of violent crimes with dwindling staff.
In the United States, many major cities suffer from worrying understaffing in the police force, while at the same time there is a rise in violent crime. “From Philadelphia to Portland to Los Angeles, homicides and gun violence are on the rise, while officers exhausted by the pandemic and disillusioned by calls for policing budget cuts following the murder of George Floyd are quitting or retiring faster than they are replaced be able”, reports the Associated Press (AP) news agency.
The agencies are scrambling to find new employees in a tight job market, the AP writes. At the same time, they reviewed what services they can still offer and what role the police should play in their communities. Many would have put veteran officers on patrol duty, disbanding specialized teams that had been built up over decades to deal with the rising number of 911 calls.
“We’re getting more calls and we have fewer people to answer them,” the news agency quoted Philadelphia Police Department spokesman Eric Gripp, whose department is deploying special forces personnel for short-term assignments to increase patrols. “It’s not just a problem in Philadelphia. Offices everywhere have shrunk and it’s difficult to recruit new staff.”
Police in New York are experiencing a wave of layoffs
In the city of New York, 2,465 officers have already left the New York Police Department (NYPD) this year alone, reports the “New York Post”. That’s a 42 percent increase from the 1,731 police officers who resigned through August last year, according to pension fund data. Even more worrying is that more and more civil servants are leaving their jobs before reaching full retirement age at 20 years of service. With 1098, their number is 71 percent higher than last year (641). Overall, the NYPD decreed according to the New York Times in 2020 about 2500 fewer officials than in 2019.
The police forces in Los Angeles and Chicago also suffered from acute staff shortages and declining applications, the newspaper writes. Chicago has therefore recently relaxed its requirements for new applicants. Los Angeles, which has more than 650 fewer officers than before the coronavirus pandemic, has closed the animal cruelty division, downsized human trafficking, narcotics and firearms divisions and cut homeless teams by 80 percent, the AP reports. And Seattle recently announced $2 million in hiring bonuses and perks to attract new hires amid a critical staff shortage that is hampering serious crime investigations.
According to the New York Times, other cities are also using incentives. For example, a member of the Oakland City Council proposed paying a $50,000 bounty to any qualified officer who joins the California coastal city’s police force.
“We do triage”
“I wonder what the profession will be like 20 years from now when we face these challenges nationwide,” AP quoted Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell, whose unit has lost 237 sworn officers to retirements or layoffs since 2020. “Will we be able to recruit enough people to serve our cities?”
Portland recorded a record 89 homicides last year — about three times the historical average — and is on track to surpass that number this year, according to the news agency. The 650,000-person Oregon city is experiencing the largest increase in homicide rates among cities of a similar size. There have already been almost 800 shootings there this year alone.
In order to counteract the violence with increased patrols, Lovell pulled officers from the assault, unsolved crime and gun violence units and formed a third homicide squad with eight employees, it said. As a result, the investigations into about 300 unsolved murder cases were temporarily stopped. “Right now, because of the increase in violent crime, we can only investigate murders, child abuse and sex crimes. We do triage,” says an officer from Gresham, a Portland suburb, describing the plight.
The situation in Portland is in line with a national trend, the AP writes. While nonviolent crime has declined during the coronavirus pandemic, the homicide rate has increased by nearly 30 percent and the number of muggings by 10 percent in 2020.
Finding the cause is difficult
The reasons for the rise in violent crime after years of decline are unclear, but Corona is one of the possible explanations. The pandemic has caused tremendous social disruption and has shaken state and local support systems, the AP reports. Gun sales have also skyrocketed during the pandemic.
The widely held theory that violent crime is higher in places that changed police tactics following the May 2020 protests against police violence over the murder of George Floyd is according to one Study by the Brennan Center for Justice not applicable. “Despite political claims that this increase was the result of criminal justice reforms in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, homicide rates in Republican- and Democrat-ruled cities rose at about the same rate,” reports the New York University Law School Institute. Republican states even had some of the highest homicide rates ever.
“The problem is that there are cities where nothing has been done and where crime has also gone up, and there are rural areas where crime has also gone up,” notes Ben Struhl, director of Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania told AP. “There are many signs that something bigger is afoot than the social justice protests that have taken place, and it’s probably more than one thing,” Struhl says of the possible causes, without giving further details.
Police strength remains at its level across the country
And when it comes to police staff shortages, the truth is a little more complicated than it seems. Because while there is a lack of civil servants in numerous metropolitan districts, their number has remained almost unchanged across the country. For example, according to the New York Times, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there were 665,380 police officers and sheriffs in the United States as of May 2021, compared to 665,280 in 2019 before the Floyd protests and the coronavirus pandemic began. The nonprofit Marshall Project, which studies criminal justice issues in the United States, found similar numbers last fall: Nationally, the police force lost only about 1 percent of its officers, while all other US industries combined lost about 6 percent had.
Christy Lopez, co-director of Georgetown University’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, suspects the staffing crisis could also be a case of misallocated resources. “You can’t take it at face value when an agency says they need more cops,” AP quoted Lopez as saying. “You have to look at a staff check: ‘What are your police officers doing?’ It is possible that a district does not need more officials, but more extracurricular care for children.
Understaffed departments sometimes put detectives on patrol due to political pressure, the director explained. But research has shown that solving violent crimes is more effective at reducing crime rates than sending ordinary officers out on the streets. “There may be places where we need more cops, but the evidence I’ve seen over the decades has convinced me that that can’t be the solution everywhere.”
Sources: Associated Press, “New York Times”, “New York Post”, Brennan Center for Justice