Cop Crunch: Identifying Strategies for Dealing with the Recruiting and Hiring Crisis in Law Enforcement

摘要

The processes of recruitment and selection are key to developing agencies with high quality personnel and to producing agencies that are representative of their communities in terms of race and gender. The headlines reveal, however, that many departments are having major problems with recruitment and hiring. And, although warnings were sounded in the 1980s and 1990s, the cop crunch based on anecdotal evidence appears to have hit many agencies very hard and very quickly. The challenge of recruiting and hiring quality personnel has emerged as a critical problem facing law enforcement nationwide. It threatens to undermine the ability of law enforcement to protect our nations citizens and to reverse important gains in our efforts to increase the representation on our forces of racial/ethnic minorities and women. In response to this potential problem, PERF conducted this project, with NIJ funding, to examine the nature and extent of the cop crunch and identify department-level policies/practices that facilitate the recruiting and hiring of quality personnel, and that facilitate the recruiting and hiring of quality women and minorities.