Throughout the country police departments are struggling with recruitment and retention while being attacked by politicians.
by Christian Gomez
Police departments, sheriffs’ offices, and other law enforcement agencies throughout the country are struggling with recruitment and retention of new officers, according to a September 2019 report published by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), entitled “The Workforce Crisis, and What Police Agencies Are Doing About It.”
“Fewer people are applying to become police officers, and more people are leaving the profession, often after only a few years on the job,” the report ominously opens. And as the report points out, this comes as many law enforcement agencies are already short-staffed. To highlight just how far recruitment levels have plummeted, the PERF — with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., the Portland, Oregon Police Bureau, the Punta Gorda, Florida Police Department, and the San Diego, California Sheriff’s Office — conducted an extensive survey of law enforcement agencies from 45 states, Washington, D.C., and Canada, representing small, medium, and large agencies. According to the data garnered from the survey, 63 percent of agencies that responded “said the number of applicants for police officer positions had decreased, either significantly (36%) or slightly (27%), over the past five years.” For example, with regard to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, “the number of applications arriving through the department’s online portal has declined nearly 60 percent since 2010,” the PERF report stated.
And regarding the low retention rate, the report also found that among “agencies that conduct exit interviews, the most common reason officers gave for resigning was to accept a job at another local law enforcement agency, but a close second reason for leaving was to pursue a career outside of law enforcement.” [Emphasis in original.] While the report focused heavily on new methods to increase recruitment and retention, it did not delve deeply enough into why officers are seeking careers outside of law enforcement.
A motivating factor seldom being discussed is how many officers are being handcuffed, so to speak, and not receiving the backup they need from their local city and/or state governments in order to effectively carry out their duties. Local municipalities and states with more liberal governments are increasingly becoming more hostile to law enforcement and in turn making it more difficult for officers to serve the public at large.
According to an investigative report from Q13, the local Fox affiliate in Seattle and western Washington, 42 exit interviews from officers that left the Seattle Police Department (SPD) between January 2018 and February 2019 revealed that most of them left due to a lack of support from the city council.
While most departing officers praised the comradery of their fellow officers, the training they received, and their supervising officers, a common thread throughout the interviews were complaints about the city council and city politics. When asked to write down the reason for leaving the force, many departing officers wrote: “Lack of support from city government,” “The lack of support with our city council,” “Local and state politics,” “The lack of support from the City,” “the City Council attitude towards the police department,” “lack of support from city politicians,” “No backing from the City,” and simply responses such as “City Council,” “city council members,” and “city politics and biased media.”
Other responses were even more poignant, such as from one officer stating, “Criminals are more empowered than [the] people that protect the city.” Another departing officer wrote, “It is extremely frustrating to constantly hear nothing but attacks and second guessing from Seattle Council Members who frequently make accusations based on biases and with no regard to fact.”
One of the loudest anti-police voices in the city council is Kshama Sawant, an openly elected member of the political party Socialist Alternative, which is the U.S. affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International — an international association of forty-one Trotskyite socialist and communist parties from around the world, including Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Sudan, Spain, Sri Lanka, and Turkey.
Sawant publicly called two SPD officers “racist murderers” following an incident on February 21, 2016, in which SPD officers fatally shot 46-year-old African-American felon Che Taylor, who was reaching out for his handgun after repeatedly being told by officers to get on the ground and put his hands up. The incident was recorded on an SPD dashcam and prosecutors decided not to file charges against the officers.
Not only did Sawant call the officers in question “racist murderers” during the course of their inquest hearing, she denied them a fair hearing, and continued to defame the officers after they were cleared of any wrongdoing. City council members like Sawant, who has a bias against police, make it difficult for law enforcement officers to protect and serve their communities. Unfortunately, anti-police rhetoric from elected officials is not isolated to Seattle or the West Coast.
Over on the East Coast, in Burlington, Vermont, with an estimated population of 43,000, progressive City Councilor Perri Freeman unashamedly suggested that police be disarmed during their normal day-to-day activities.
“How much is the lethal force — is it really causing at the end of the day, more harm than benefit?” Freeman told local NBC5 news. Freeman initially brought up the idea during a city council meeting this past summer. She came up with the idea after previously spending time in Iceland, a country with half of the population of Vermont, but where police officers do not normally carry firearms.
Freeman argued that police do not need to carry firearms and that when they do, “it actually escalates the violence in our communities. It doesn’t encourage people to be less violent.” Although she has not formally submitted her proposal to the city council, she admits that her proposal won’t happen overnight; instead she describes it as a “gradual program” designed to “shift and talk about doing things maybe differently in a way that might actually work better in the long run.”
Burlington police disagree. “There are a lot of guns around, and we as the police try to put ourselves in the position of advantage all the time, and to show up to an armed incident unarmed? I can’t think of anything more disadvantaged than that,” Dan Gilligan, president of the Burlington Police Officer’s Association, told NBC 5.
Even in situations where officers are armed, new guidelines and policies enacted by liberal-dominated city governments are preventing cops from defending themselves even when assaulted, like in New York City.
Earlier this year, in two separate incidents captured on video, one in the Harlem section of Manhattan and the other in Brooklyn, NYPD officers were subject to water-bucket attacks. In one of the incidents, NYPD officers were handcuffing a suspect when another individual carrying a bucket approached the officers and drenched them with water. In the footage of the other incident, two NYPD officers are seen walking away as they are repeatedly being dowsed with water from buckets, with one of the perpetrators walking right behind one of the retreating officers and dumping water directly over the officer’s head.
According to the New York Post, “One of the cops recently graduated from the Police Academy and the other has about a year on the job.” A police source told the Post that the incidents were the result of the NYPD’s “hands-off approach” under NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“Who does that in their right frame of mind? People who believe there’s no consequences,” the source told the Post. “There’s total anarchy out here. This is very sad.”
According to Patrick Lynch, the president of the NYPD Police Benevolent Association, the water-bucket attacks are “the end result of the torrent of bad policies and anti-police rhetoric that has been streaming out of City Hall and Albany for years now.” Adding, “We are approaching the point of no return. Disorder controls the streets, and our elected leaders refuse to allow us to take them back.”
Policies allegedly designed to de-escalate violence are having the adverse effect of emboldening certain segments of the population to become even more brazen towards officers potentially resulting in a new dangerous level of lawlessness.
“Today it’s a bucket of water. Tomorrow it could be a bucket of cement,” one NYPD supervisor warned, referring to the slaying of New York City Housing Authority Police Officer John Williamson, who was fatally struck by a 30-pound bucket of spackling compound thrown from a rooftop in Washington Heights, in 1993.
Furthermore, the fact that such policies presuppose cops as being the source of violence or brutality seriously underscores the flawed nature of such policies and rules. This begs the question of who elected officials in liberal municipalities are actually worried about: criminals or the police?
“They encourage de-policing,” Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, said about the Minneapolis City Council, while appearing as a guest on Fox News’ Fox & Friends.
“It’s an agenda here. It’s an ultra-left agenda here that the police are the problem.”
Lt. Kroll was invited on Fox & Friends to discuss the spike in violent mob-style beatings in Minneapolis, as the city faces what’s been described as a “crippling police shortage.”
Kroll explained how the city’s chief of police has requested to hire 400 additional police officers, but the mayor is only offering 14 new officers because of the politics of the city council. “The mayor didn’t think he could get more than 14 through the city council. The council is actually more of a problem than the mayor,” Kroll said.
“The council ran on an anti-police agenda and they all made it,” Kroll elaborated. “It’s ultra-left. It’s been an extreme Democrat-controlled council. We’ve got one Green Party member, the rest are Democrats. It’s been that way for 22 years.” Twelve of the city’s 13 wards are represented by Democrats along with Green Party member Cam Gordon representing Ward 2. Unfortunately, even getting 14 police may be a stretch in this council.
“We’re policing a city of 70,000 more people with 70 less officers than we did 20 years ago,” Kroll said. As the chief of police continues to make the case for expanding the size of the force, it remains to be seen if and when the city council will come to terms with the reality of the situation.
How much more will crime continue to increase and violence rise before elected city officials, not just in Minneapolis but elsewhere throughout the country, provide the resources and manpower for local police and sheriffs’ departments to effectively do the job they were hired and trained to do?
Unfortunately, it is as though police departments are being held hostage by a spree of radical leftist, anti-police dominated city councils, mayors’ offices, and other local governments.
Much of the anti-police rhetoric is being fueled by the same well-organized groups on the left that quickly mobilize mass demonstrations in the streets with pre-printed signs and that call for the abolition of ICE and border patrol; the overthrow of capitalism; pledge solidarity with foreign powers such as Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia, and international terrorist groups like the Palestinian Liberation Organization; and that demand the release of convicted and incarcerated cop killers.
Such organizations often identify with a particular ideology such as Marxist, Maoist, Stalinist, or Trotskyite, and use names like communist, antifascist, and socialist.
Citizen awareness about the need to hire more cops and about the harmful policies enacted by extreme-left city governments may go a long way in educating the electorate to support their local police and sheriffs, and to elect sensible city councilors and mayors who will in turn back up their municipalities’ law enforcement agencies.
One such organization that has been has been leading the effort, since the early 1960s, to educate and rally public support for local police departments and keeping them independent is The John Birch Society through its Support Your Local Police (SYLP) action project.
In 1963, The John Birch Society launched its “Support Your Local Police and Keep Them Independent” action project based in part on a plot against police that was uncovered by the now-defunct Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1961. In response to these revelations about subversive activity against police departments being perpetrated by communist organizations, The John Birch Society encouraged its members across the country to create ad hoc SYLP committees to work with both JBS and non-JBS members alike to support local police, educate the public at large, and to help expose organized radical leftists’ activity directed against police departments.
The organized plot revealed in the Senate report included using crowd manipulation, “spontaneous” riots and demonstrations, and waging campaigns of false “police brutality.” Doesn’t that sound familiar?
Over the years, SYLP committees have been very successful. Through these committees, members and non-members alike meet with their local officers, address city council members, hold educational video showings for local citizens, phone legislators; distribute literature, and much more to combat the radical anti-cop agenda.
Anyone interested in learning more about, joining an existing, or creating a new SYLP committee should contact SYLP Coordinator Robin Kinderman at 1-800-JBS-USA1 or at 1-920-749-3780. Your involvement in a SYLP committee is needed now more than ever to stand up for and protect our local police.