PUBLIC SAFETY Station to Station
A nationwide police shortage hits home
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ou get into work at eight in the morning, you take your lunch at noon, and by 3:00 you start casually glancing at the clock, looking forward to quittin’ time. But for many police officers on the job, they wouldn’t be leaving at 4:00, or 5:00, or even 6:00; they’d be starting their second shift of eight hours, looking forward to midnight. At police stations across the nation, officers are being showered with overtime to cover a police shortage that seems to get worse every year. Overtime is just one of the side-effects of this shortage, but the main questions are: why is there a shortage and what can be done to solve it? The police shortage is best expressed in terms of budgeted resources. In Connecticut, some towns are down just a handful of police officers due to injuries or military duty. The shortage is felt more acutely in cities like New Haven where the number is down to under 400 currently staffed positions compared to the 495 budgeted positions (some outlets count officers in the academy as part of the staffed positions, even if they are not currently on the job). This is by no means to single out New Haven; the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which looks at employment statistics found that in general-purpose law enforcement agencies across the country, the number of full-time sworn officers dropped from just under 725,000 to about 700,000 in the three years between 2013 and 2016. What’s more, these figures are in direct contrast to population growth. The BJS estimated that there were 2.42 officers per 1,000 residents in 1997, falling down to 2.17 by 2016. One obvious repercussion is the immediate lack of police officers to fill roles. It was from the Danbury News Times that we learned that some officers were being asked to cover 16-hour shifts. Though this overtime is welcomed by some, it can have deleterious effects. On-the-job burnout is real, and according to studies done at Ohio State University, “job schedules with long working hours are not more risky merely because they are concentrated in inherently hazardous industries or occupations.” Another pitfall from this shortage is taking place in West Haven, where the city is opting to pull a school resource officer from Bailey Middle School to be placed back on the beat. While their shortage is not as severe as other municipalities, hard decisions like this are being made every day. So where did all the cops go? Answers have been as disparate as their sources — some say it’s the salary or pensions, some say it’s the job market, some blame the media — but none fit the one-size-fits-all answer that would make this an easy problem to solve.
34 | CONNECTICUT TOWN & CITY | MAY 2019
In one case, NPR describes the problem as “money — evident in the department’s worn-out squad cars, one of which has a rust hole in the floorboard that has been patched with an old license plate.” Connecticut does pay its police officers well. Based on information from Data USA, the state pays higher-than-average wages in every tract (which this site splits into 12 distinct areas called Public Use Microdata Areas, also known as PUMAs). The average wage goes from $65,415 to $102,982, in PUMAs surrounding the New London area. Bridgeport, which roughly estimates the average pay in Connecticut, pays more than 80 percent of PUMAs in the entire country. But it’s also true that a dollar in Connecticut doesn’t go nearly as far as a dollar in other states. In the same NPR report, they bring up lateral hiring, more familiarly known as poaching. In one case, the Seattle Police Department put up a billboard in Indi-
