Never stop never copping

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.

So it looks like the issue is that even though APD is hiring and has continuously tried to hire they are also losing folks to retirements and promotions and the number of new hires doesn’t keep up with normal attrition of an older workforce. The report further summarizes that the reason why the lateral program hasn’t worked is because other cities outside the immediate Bay Area also have staffing shortages, have similar incentives programs, and have lower cost of living and housing costs which make it more attractive to these folks. So, congratulations NIMBYs, your insistence that building more housing with bring more crime also contributes to not being able to fill public safety roles because it’s too expensive for folks to live in the area. Well done.

To combat the cost of living and housing cost gap, APD is asking that we throw a lot more money in incentives to any one who wants to join the police department and would be around $75K.

Anyway, we are at an all time low though for police officers:

I think what’s missing from this analysis is how the work has changed because of the removal of parking control duties from the police department and how we could further remove APD from the work of the Care Team and how that would free up officers for other duties.