Generally in social media threads about centered around crime you will inevitably have someone loudly and wrongly proclaim that to be the fault of the City Council for defunding the police (or something like that) and pronounce that we should be hiring more police officers. When faced with information that it’s really hard to hire police officers right now and it’s not limited to just being an Alameda problem often time the loud and wrong will scoff and say that information is incorrect and that, clearly, the City Council just hasn’t put any money into fully staffing the police department.
Welp, looks like the police department is back to tell the City Council, once again, that they’re having trouble hiring despite the loud and wrong announcing that it’s the fault of the City Council for not throwing enough money at the police department.
Currently, APD sworn staffing is down nearly 30% with aggregate sworn vacancies totaling 24 out of 88. These trends are being experienced throughout Alameda County (County), the state, and region. Although APD has hired 20 new Police Officers since June 2021, the rate of staffing attrition has outpaced the rate of staffing additions. APD and Human Resources (HR) staff have endeavored to recruit quality candidates by:
• Advertising regular job announcements;
• Streamlining hiring procedures to include holding the written exam, physical ability and oral board process on site and in 1 – 2 days; and
• Offering creative hiring bonuses and incentives such as matched/higher salary than previous employers, front loaded vacations, and lump sums of pay.
Even still, these strategies have not yielded the positive returns that were expected. There are several challenges in hiring quality candidates. As mentioned above, these challenges are being experienced throughout the industry at a significant rate. Considerations by quality candidates include:
• Housing affordability in and around the Alameda community;
• Full-time and in-person shift work; and
• The perceived stigma in policing.
While we’ve already approved an incentive program for hiring lateral police officers (meaning police officers who come from other cities) it looks like the Chief wants to expand that to cover any one who wants to join APD even newbies. By the way, according to the staff report the lateral police officer incentive program didn’t attract any takers.
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