Police Recruiting Spirals Downward

According to figures released by Oakland's city administrator, recruiting for police training academies is spiraling downward.

The police academy that began last July enrolled 34 candidates, although academies have 40 slots. The dropout rate was an astounding 47%, a figure that Chief Tucker in recent public meetings buried in a composite figure of "30% or a little higher."

The next academy, which convened last November, filled only 27 slots. The most recent academy, begun earlier this month, started with only 24 candidates.

Already the November academy is down to 20 trainees; the February academy also lost two enrollees, bringing it to 22 trainees. Oakland is adding officers at only half its current capacity.

Since the next regular academy is not scheduled to begin until June 2006, something less than 42 – perhaps three dozen – new officers will be hired through regular academies. Meanwhile, we expect about two dozen officers to retire or resign by June 30, 2006.

The city administrator's report, dated Feb. 28, 2006 but filed Feb. 16, wraps the disastrous recruiting results in pages and pages about attempts to make the recruiting process more productive. However, the report ignores the crucial factor behind the downward recruiting spiral: the city council's deliberate understaffing of the police department. A hiring freeze began in 2002 and ran through 2004 (indeed, until after the council extorted Measure Y taxes from voters in Nov. 2004). Understaffing is so severe that potential recruits must be reluctant to join OPD, especially if they observe the councilmembers' continued political games and refusal to commit to a police force of at least 1,100, with real shifts of resources to back it up.

Overtime is mandatory, and morale is at a ten-year low. Worse, police chief Tucker expresses disdain for good morale, saying that officers can be compelled to perform whether their morale is high or low.

Over the last ten years, Oakland funded an additional 357 staff, as the annual budget approaches one billion dollars – yet police staffing remained essentially stagnant. Until Oakland makes peaceful neighborhoods the top priority of city government, the crisis of police recruiting will only get worse.

San Francisco Can Recruit Police; Why Not Oakland?

After the city council's campaign for Measure Y succeeded at the Nov. 2004 ballot, councilmembers and the City were supposed to deliver a police force of 802 police. Yet today the City employs just 700 officers, down several dozen from the 734 we had when the council wrote Measure Y.

Perhaps the most often repeated excuse from council members, mayoral candidates, city officials, and loyal followers like the chair of the Community Policing Advisory Board, is the wail that it is just darned hard for any city to recruit police officers these days.

For example, police chief Tucker, in his March 3, 2006 "Vision and Plan of Action," asserts, "We are competing in the hottest job market for law enforcement in the modern history of the state. The entire state is experiencing a shortage of police officers as the 'baby boomer' generation of police officers retires." (p. 2)

Apparently, San Francisco has literally detached from the rest of the state. An item in the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the city assembled a group of "50 or so recruits" (Matier and Ross, March 15, 2006) for a March academy. That's nearly twice what recent Oakland police academies have started with. (Another Oakland problem is that academy washout rates are now as high as 47%, double the historical average of one in four.)

San Francisco has its own problem. Because of budget battles, SFPD had to postpone the academy. Certainly, money is not Oakland's problem, given Measure Y (except that council members would love to divert the funds to other uses).

City Hall and chief Tucker cannot blame the failure to recruit officers on factors that are supposedly affecting all cities or all California cities. Oakland has unique problems recruiting, including departmental morale under chief Tucker falling to a ten-year low, mandatory overtime, an internal affairs watchdog function that is out of control, and a history of understaffing in the face of huge crime challenges.

Perhaps most important today, with the visible and documented jump in crime and the new level of Oaklanders' outrage at living in lawless neighborhoods, Oakland has difficulty recruiting because no city "leaders" will propose and commit longterm resources to a plan for at least 1,100 officers. If the City is not going to fix the problem, why would a potential police officer throw himself or herself into a situation destined to get worse?

In any case, please spare us the "nobody can recruit" excuses.