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Contents
The Authors and Contributors
Acknowledgements
Key Findings at a Glance
Determinants of Sworn Force Strength
Hiring and Training Officers
Officer Attrition and Tenure
Retention of COPS-Funded Positions
Chapter 1. Introduction and Summary
1.1. Introduction: Study Background and Scope
1.2. Summary of Findings
1.3. Retention of COPS-Funded Positions and Historical Patterns of Staff Retention
Chapter 2. Research Evidence on the Factors Influencing
Police Strength in the United States
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The Evolution of Research on Police Strength
2.3. Discussion and Conclusions
Chapter 3. A Survey-Based Assessment of Factors Causing Changes
in Sworn Force Size: Examining the Perceptions of Police
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Data and Methods
3.3. Recent Patterns of Change in the Size of Police Agencies
3.4. Factors Causing Increases and Decreases in Sworn Force Strength, 1996-1999
3.5. Racial / Economic Conflict and Police Growth
3.6. Discussion
Chapter 4. Hiring, Training, and Retention of Police Officers:
A National Examination of Patterns and Emerging Trends
4.1. Hiring and Training Officers
4.2. Officer Attrition and Tenure
4.3. Discussion
Appendix 4.A. Officer Allocation and the COPS Program: Some Thoughts
about Future Lines of Inquiry
Chapter 5.Retention of Staff Positions Funded through the Federal Cops Program:
Comparing Retention Rates among Cops Agencies to Historical Patterns
of Staff Retention in Police Agencies
5.1. Retention of Staffing Increases Funded by COPS Hiring Grants
5.2. Historical Patterns of Staff Retention Following Periods of Agency Growth
5.3. Comparing Retention Rates Among COPS Grantees to Historical Retention Patterns
References
Methodological Appendix. The Police Hiring and Retention (H&R) Survey
A.1. Overview of the COPS-Police Hiring and Retention Survey Sample
A.2. Development of the Sample Design
The Authors and Contributors
Christopher S. Koper, Ph.D., Research Associate, Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania.
Edward R. Maguire, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Administration of Justice Program, George Mason University.
Gretchen E. Moore, M.A., Research Associate, The Urban Institute.
David E. Huffer, M.A., doctoral student, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland.
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by grant 99-IJ-CX-0011 from the National Institute of Justice (U.S. Department of Justice) to the Urban Institute. Additional support was provided by the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology of the University of Pennsylvania.
The authors wish to thank a number of people and organizations that assisted this project in various ways. Staff of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) conducted the telephone interviews for the Police Hiring and Retention Survey. Alma Kuby and Laurie Imhoff managed NORC’s efforts in planning and implementing the interviews. They and other NORC staff provided feedback on the survey instrument. Thanks go to NORC staff for completing the survey on time, under budget, and with high response rates. Thanks also go, of course, to the 1,270 police chiefs and their designees who agreed to participate in the survey.
Jeffrey Roth assisted in the development of the survey instrument and lent advice on various aspects of the project. Michael Buerger, Joseph Ryan, Alberto Melis, and Ray Manus provided helpful comments on early versions of the survey instrument. Ruth White provided research assistance in the early stages of the project, and Rob Santos also assisted in the early phases of project development. David Williams formatted the draft and final versions of the report and provided other research assistance.
Staff of the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, particularly Rob Chapman, Pam Cammarata, and Veh Bezdikian, helped define several research issues for the study, provided COPS Office databases, and offered comments on draft versions of the survey instrument and report. At the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), Steve Edwards served as grant monitor, providing advice and managerial support. Anonymous reviewers for NIJ gave valuable comments on the draft version of the report.
The opinions expressed in the report are those of the authors and should not be attributed to any of the aforementioned persons or organizations.
Key Findings at a Glance
This report presents a series of papers addressing a number of staffing issues in policing: determinants of police staffing levels; the processes of hiring and training officers; and retention patterns associated with individual officers and staff positions. The papers are the result of an Urban Institute project funded by the National Institute of Justice to develop baseline data and knowledge that could prove useful in managing and assessing the federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program (the federal government’s initiative to put 100,000 additional police on the streets through hiring grants and other means) as well as inform other research and policy issues in policing.
Most findings are based on results from a telephone survey with a nationally representative probability sample of 1,270 police agencies. The survey analyses are supplemented by analyses of national data on police employment and reviews of prior studies on the determinants of police strength. We present many findings separately for small jurisdictions (those with populations smaller than 50,000 persons) and large jurisdictions (those with 50,000 or more persons). Key findings from the study include the following.
Determinants of Sworn Force Strength
Factors influencing police strength (measured in terms of officers or expenditures) are not well understood. A review of 55 empirical studies on the determinants of police strength across places and/or over time revealed inconsistent findings for variables commonly used to predict police strength.
New survey analyses measuring the perceptions of police suggest that grant money, crime, calls for service, and population were some of the leading contributors to police growth from 1996 to 1999. Fiscal constraints and the lack of qualified recruits were two of the leading factors associated with police decline during this same period. Some factors linked to police staffing may be differentially associated with police growth and decline; most notably, crime may contribute to growth in staffing but not have much influence on reductions in staffing.
Hiring and Training Officers
The process of screening and training new officers takes an average of 31 weeks in small agencies and 43 weeks in large agencies. Ninety-two of every one hundred new hires in small agencies and eighty-nine of one hundred in large agencies successfully complete all training.
Slightly less than 60% of agencies reported that the length of the training process has increased in recent years due to new training requirements, some of which involve training for community policing.
Over half of small agencies and two-thirds of large agencies reported that a lack of qualified applicants caused difficulties in filling recent vacancies. Close to half of small agencies and over half of large agencies also reported modest staffing problems caused by unanticipated vacancies.
Officer Attrition and Tenure
Officers serve for shorter periods in small agencies than in large agencies. Half of officers leaving large agencies but only a fifth of those leaving small agencies are retirees. Further, two-thirds of departing officers in small agencies and about a third of those in large agencies leave after five or less years of service. It is estimated that nearly half of officers departing small agencies and about a quarter of those leaving large agencies go on to other law enforcement work.
Retention of COPS-Funded Positions
Based on short-term (1-2 years) follow-up data, approximately three-quarters of agencies with expired COPS grants have retained their COPS-funded positions (to this point, virtually all retaining agencies have kept all of their COPS positions). About two-thirds of grantees expect to keep all of their non-expired COPS positions, while 74% of small grantees and 80% of large grantees expect to keep at least some of their non-expired COPS positions. Most of these agencies expect to retain the COPS positions for 5 or more years.
Overall, observed and expected retention rates among COPS grantees appear to be fairly consistent with historical retention patterns, based on a national analysis of twenty years of police employment data which examined retention of new positions by police organizations following periods when the organizations grew substantially.
Chapter 1. Introduction and Summary
Christopher S. Koper
1.1. Introduction: Study Background and Scope
This report contains a collection of readings that examine various staffing issues in policing. These readings address three broad issues: determinants of police staffing levels; the processes of hiring, training, and deploying officers; and retention patterns associated with individual officers and staff positions. The papers are the result of an Urban Institute research project funded by the National Institute of Justice to, in large part, answer questions of interest to policymakers in the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (i.e., the COPS Office), the agency that administers the federal Community Oriented Policing Services program. Passed by Congress as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the COPS program is the federal government’s initiative to add 100,000 officers to the nation’s police agencies through grants for hiring new officers and other means (see Roth et al. 2000a for an in-depth description and evaluation of the COPS program).
COPS Office staff sought answers to a number of questions that would assist them in planning, managing, and assessing the COPS program. However, direct evaluation of the COPS program was not the focus of this research effort. Instead, the project emphasized the development of baseline data and knowledge that could prove useful in managing and evaluating various aspects of the COPS program, such as grantees’ progress in hiring and deploying officers and grantees’ retention of COPS-funded positions. Based on discussions with COPS Office staff and additional considerations, we identified a series of general research questions covering a range of loosely related police staffing issues.
- What factors determine the size of police agencies, i.e., what factors influence variation in agency size across places and over time? Are these factors similar for large and small police organizations? Are the factors contributing to police growth different from those leading to reductions in police?
- How long does it typically take to hire, train, and deploy police officers? What are the attrition rates in this process? What problems do agencies encounter in hiring and training officers?
- How long do officers serve with their agencies and under what circumstances do they leave?
- How long do agencies maintain new positions following periods of growth, irrespective of the particular officers filling those positions? How do current and expected retention rates for COPS-funded positions compare to historical norms of staff retention?
Though these questions are clearly relevant to the administration and assessment of the COPS program, they have broader relevance to several research and policy issues.
In order to address these issues, project staff utilized a number of methods: critical synthesis of literature, analysis of secondary data sources, and collection and analysis of survey data. The largest part of the research effort involved the development of a telephone survey that was administered during the summer of 2000 to a nationally representative sample of nearly 1,300 police agencies. The survey, referred to hereafter as the Police Hiring and Retention (H&R) Survey, is described in the Methodological Appendix. Most of the chapters in this volume are based on analyses of the H&R survey data.
Due to the range of topics explored in this project, the style of this report is more like that of an edited book volume than a report with tightly integrated chapters. The remaining chapters of the report are divided into two parts. Part I consists of chapters Two and Three which examine the determinants of police agency size using, respectively, critical assessment of existing literature and survey data analysis. Employing these complementary approaches, these chapters investigate the factors, many of them external to police agencies, which cause variation in the size of police organizations across places and over time.
The determinants of sworn force levels investigated in Chapters Two and Three influence policymakers as they establish target levels of policing for their jurisdictions. Once those target levels of policing are established, however, the processes of hiring, training, and retaining officers affect both the speed with which agencies can reach these target staffing levels and their ability to maintain them. Hiring and retention issues are the subjects of chapters Four and Five, which constitute Part II of the report. Using the H&R survey data, Chapter Four provides descriptive analyses of various aspects of police hiring and retention patterns, including the length of time it takes agencies to hire and train new officers and the length of time that officers serve with their agencies. Finally, employing both the H&R survey data and analysis of national police employment data, Chapter Five examines retention rates for police positions funded through the COPS program and compares these retention rates to historical retention norms in police agencies.
1.2. Summary of Findings
1.2.1. Determinants of Sworn Force Strength
Scholars have used three theoretical frameworks to explain variation in police strength. Rational public choice theory links variation in police strength to variables such as crime and population, which reflect demand for police services. Conflict theory holds that governments increase their police forces in response to growth in populations that dominant groups deem to be threatening. Threatening populations may be defined in racial terms (e.g., non-white groups) or in economic terms (e.g., the poor and unemployed). Finally, organizational theory stresses internal organizational factors that influence the size of police agencies. Empirically, scholars typically approximate these factors by using yesterday’s police strength to predict today’s police strength.
However, the factors influencing police strength are not well understood. Chapter Two reviews 55 empirical studies on the determinants of police strength, revealing that with the exception of the prior (i.e., lagged) size of the police force, none of the factors commonly studied have been shown to influence police levels on a consistent basis. Consider, for example, the impact of violent crime on police strength. Though one would expect that increases in violent crime lead to police growth, only 48% of the studies examining the impact of violent crime on police found the expected positive association. Forty-five percent of the studies found no statistically meaningful effect of violent crime on police, and seven percent found a significant inverse relationship between these variables (suggesting that increases in violent crime lead to reductions in police strength). The mixed findings of prior research are largely attributable to a number of methodological points, such as variation in the definition of police strength across studies (some studies measure police strength in terms of personnel while others measure it in terms of expenditures), variation in the unit of analysis across studies (e.g., cities, states, etc.), poor and/or inconsistent model specification, and complexities involved in disentangling the mutual effects which variables like crime and police levels have upon each other.
Chapter Two concludes with recommendations for improving research in this area. Among these is the call for more research on the interpretations and assessments of actors who make decisions about police strength. Indeed, prior studies have generally treated the decision-making process as a black box, using aggregate-level correlations between police strength and other factors to make indirect inferences about the process. Chapter Three takes a modest step towards rectifying this by using the H&R survey data to examine police officials’ perceptions about factors that caused changes in the size of their agencies from 1996 through 1999. An advantage to studying the determinants of police strength in this way is that it taps into the perceptions of people who have insight into the actual process by which staffing levels are set.
Overall, the study period was characterized by police growth. Slightly over half of police agencies grew during this period, while only 11% of large agencies (defined as those serving jurisdictions of 50,000 or more persons) and 22% of small agencies (defined as those serving jurisdictions with fewer than 50,000 persons) decreased in size. Respondents’ perceptions supported some of the leading theories about influences on police staffing: among both large and small agencies, changes in crime, calls for service, and population had important influences on growing agencies, while changes in government revenue and fiscal constraints (including generally declining economic conditions) had notable impacts on shrinking agencies.
As the preceding statement suggests, however, some of the factors associated with changes in police staffing may have differential effects on growth and decline in police agencies. If true, this may help to explain some of the conflicting findings of past research. Most notably, police perceptions suggest that crime fuels growth in staffing but that it has little or no influence on reductions in staffing. Rather than causing cutbacks in police, perhaps the potential impact of declining crime rates on police staffing is mitigated by organizational inertia and the political difficulties of reducing police forces. This implies that rising crime rates have more impact on police agencies than do declining crime rates. Consequently, the results of any given study of crime and police staffing could be highly contingent on crime trends during the study period and assumptions about the functional form of the relationship between the variables.
Two additional factors that had strong influences on recent trends in police staffing were grant money and the availability of qualified recruits. Police in both growing and shrinking agencies rated the availability of grant money as the first or second most important factor affecting changes in the size of their agencies (for shrinking agencies, the findings suggest that the availability of grant money prevented the agencies from declining further and/or that the absence of grant money facilitated reductions in force). The importance of grant money to both growing and declining agencies suggests that the federal COPS program has perhaps been the single most important factor both facilitating growth and slowing reductions in police strength during the latter 1990s, though we should temper this conclusion by noting that the study did not distinguish between the effects of COPS hiring grants and other federal or state hiring grants available during the study period. The availability of qualified recruits, or the lack thereof, was an important factor cited by respondents in agencies with declining staff, a finding echoed elsewhere in the report. This finding would seem to be linked to the strong economy of recent years; ironically, strong economic times may boost funds available for policing but make it more difficult for police organizations to attract and retain recruits.
1.2.2. Hiring, Training, and Retention of Officers
As noted above, police staffing levels are also affected by the success of agencies in hiring, training, and retaining officers. The H&R survey provided a descriptive snapshot of hiring and retention patterns in police organizations as of the summer of 2000.
The process of screening and training new officers takes an average of 31 weeks in small agencies and 43 weeks in large agencies. Ninety-two of every one hundred new hires in small agencies and eighty-nine of every one-hundred new hires in large agencies complete all training successfully. Nearly 60% of agencies reported that their training time had increased in recent years (only 4% reported a decrease in the length of training). Among agencies reporting an increase in training time, about a third reported that new training requirements associated with community policing had contributed to the increase.
Over half of small agencies and two-thirds of large agencies reported that a lack of qualified applicants caused them at least some difficulty in filling vacancies during 1999. Indeed, this problem caused much difficulty for a quarter of small agencies and nearly a third of large agencies. While we do not have historical data to show whether this problem has become worse over time, the findings lend credence to anecdotal accounts suggesting that the supply of good police recruits is down throughout the nation.
Although overall attrition rates in police agencies did not seem unusually high during 1999 (the rates were 5% for large agencies and 7% for small agencies), there were some indications that unanticipated vacancies may have exacerbated recruitment difficulties. Unanticipated vacancies caused at least some degree of difficulty in maintaining staffing levels for 56% of large agencies and 44% of small agencies. Retirements by baby boom officers are a likely contributor to this pattern, but substantial numbers of departing officers are leaving their agencies after only a few years of service. An estimated two-thirds of officers who left small agencies and a third of those who left large agencies during 1999 had served for 5 or fewer years. As with the recruitment findings, however, we lack the historical data to say whether or not this pattern represents a new development. Further, these officers did not all leave the policing profession; overall, an estimated 45% of officers who left small agencies and 24% of those who left large agencies continued in other law enforcement work.
Nevertheless, the findings on officer recruitment and retention could be a warning flag for law enforcement. It is likely that the strong economy of recent years has aggravated recruitment and retention problems by luring some potential and new recruits away from law enforcement and into better paying jobs in the private sector. Current criticism of police over matters such as racial profiling and excessive use of force could be discouraging some from the profession as well. Further, the recent hiring binge in law enforcement, fueled by the COPS program, may have significantly drained the pool of potential applicants, thereby increasing competition between agencies for good officers. These problems could become worse as larger numbers of baby boom officers enter their retirement years. This raises the danger that some agencies may feel pressure to lower their standards in order to fill positions, a move which has had demonstrably negative consequences in some places. Hence, strengthening methods for recruiting and retaining qualified officers could be emerging as one of the major contemporary challenges facing law enforcement administrators.
Another implication of the findings is that efforts by the COPS Office and other agencies to increase police staffing through grants for hiring new officers may be approaching a saturation point, at least for the present. Hence, COPS grants that attempt to put more officers in the field through efficiency gains from newly funded civilians and technology, rather than through funding new sworn officers, could begin to assume a more prominent role in OCOPS’ funding efforts. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the nation’s changing economic conditions will alter the patterns of hiring and retention observed in this study.
1.3. Retention of COPS-Funded Positions and Historical Patterns of Staff Retention
Chapter Five deviates somewhat from the earlier chapters by examining an issue of direct relevance to the performance of the federal COPS program – post-grant retention of COPS-funded positions. As noted above, the COPS program represents the federal government’s recent effort to add 100,000 additional police to the nation’s communities. Grants to state and local agencies for hiring new officers represent the largest part of this effort. When the COPS Office reached the milestone of funding 100,000 officers in May 1999, about 61,000 of these officers had been funded through COPS hiring grants.
A key factor that will shape the long-term legacy of the COPS program is the extent to which COPS grantees retain COPS-funded positions (irrespective of the individual officers filling those positions) after fulfilling COPS programmatic requirements mandating that grantees keep these positions for one full budget cycle following the expiration of the three-year grants. In other words, how much of the police expansion funded by COPS will prove to be only temporary?
To investigate this issue, we examined retention experiences and projections among a subsample of agencies in the H&R survey sample. The selected agencies, all 1995 COPS hiring grantees, were among the earliest COPS hiring grantees and, therefore, represent grantees most likely to have positions that are, or are close to being, programmatically expired (i.e., positions which have been expired for more than one full budget cycle). Note, however, that even among this group of early grantees, less than half had programmatically expired COPS positions. Based on the timing of the survey, moreover, the positions that were programmatically expired had been so for only 1 or, at most, 2 years. Therefore, the reported retention rates reflect only short-term experience.
Nearly three-quarters of COPS grantees having expired positions reported having kept all of their positions without using cuts or attrition of other positions, at least in the short term. (Note that the retention figures reported here refer to the percentage of agencies retaining positions rather than the specific number of positions that the agencies are retaining; the latter issue will be the subject of a forthcoming report.) Virtually all grantees reported having kept either all or none of the COPS positions.
When asked about expected retention of non-expired COPS positions, about two-thirds of grantees anticipated keeping all of the positions, but 74% of small agencies and 80% of large agencies expected to keep at least some of the positions. However, a small group of agencies, particularly in small jurisdictions, may retain their COPS positions for only a few years. Whereas 74% of small agencies expected to keep at least some COPS positions after expiration, only about 68% expected to retain the positions for as long as five years.
Overall, therefore, it appears that retention rates among COPS grantees will be far from perfect. On the other hand, a substantial majority of COPS grantees will keep some or all of their COPS-funded positions. Most agencies expecting to retain COPS positions anticipate retaining them all, and most expect to keep them for the long term.
Should we view these retention rates as evidence of success or failure? One way that we might begin to address this question is to put COPS retention rates into an appropriate context. To this end, project staff analyzed twenty years of national data (1975-1994) on police employment to determine how long agencies typically retained new positions following significant staffing increases (defined as an increase of 20% or more in small agencies and 5% or more in large agencies) in the years prior to the COPS program. The historical analysis revealed that it is not uncommon for agencies to fail to retain new positions, particularly in the long term (i.e., 5 or more years). Following a period of staffing growth, small agencies tended to retain at least some of the new positions on a short term basis (i.e., 1-2 years) in 72% to 81% of cases while retaining new positions for as long as five years in only 59% of cases. For large agencies, the short-term retention rates (for keeping at least some of the positions) were 87% to 92%, and the 5-year rate was 79%. These numbers are quite comparable to the observed and expected retention rates reported by COPS grantees for expired and non-expired positions.
Overall, it seems that putting an additional 100,000 officers on the street on a permanent, or at least indefinite, basis will require the federal government to fund more than 100,000 officers, perhaps substantially more. OCOPS has continued to fund new officers since May of 1999, so the goal of putting 100,000 officers on the street may still be met. Some might consider the need to fund more than 100,000 officers to be evidence of program failure. On the other hand, the data available at this point provide tentative indications that retention rates for COPS funded positions will be comparable to historical norms. Therefore, it seems that money spent raising police staffing levels through COPS hiring grants will produce a return on investment very comparable to the typical return on investments to increase police staffing.
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