6 minute read
On The Cover
Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal (foreground) and Arcata Police Chief Brian Ahearn are both thinking outside the box as they try to hold the line on service levels with depleted staffing.
Photo by Mark McKenna
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Help Wanted
A staffing ‘crisis’ has law enforcement triaging while grasping for answers
By Thadeus Greenson
thad@northcoastjournal.com
In Eureka, officers are working an emergency schedule built on 12.5-hour shifts and mandatory overtime, as the police department’s once touted Problem Oriented Policing and Community Safety Engagement teams operate with skeletal staffing.
In Arcata, two detectives have been pulled back to patrol and all calls for service that don’t involve someone in danger have been deprioritized, while proactive policing measures — like traffic enforcement in front of local schools or a detail to address the problematic group of homeless people doing drugs and relieving themselves in public near the Arcata Community Center — have been shelved.
For the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, 12-hour schedules and mandatory overtime — with deputies working holidays and weekends and days off — have become the norm. Resident deputy posts sit vacant while regular rural patrols and around-the-clock coverage of outlying areas have been abandoned for the time being. Amid a pandemic, deputies are afraid to call in sick for fear of leaving their co-workers stretched even thinner while the county looks to renegotiate police services contracts with the cities of Blue Lake and Trinidad because it can’t deliver the promised regular patrols. Some nights, just eight deputies are left to cover the county’s almost 4,000 square miles of unincorporated territory.
“That’s a lot of ground to cover,” says Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal over the phone, frustration evident in his voice.
Humboldt County’s largest law enforcement agencies are all struggling to recruit and retain officers, mirroring state and national trends that see higher rates of officers retiring or otherwise leaving the profession, with a shallowing pool of applicants signing up to replace them. The issue isn’t new — we wrote about it in these pages in January of 2020 (“Recruitment and Retention”) — but it seems to be getting worse, not better.
The reasons are myriad — what some describe as a “perfect storm” of challenges facing the profession — but the result is that agencies are vying for any and all recruitment and retention advantages. Officials are also increasingly looking for outside-the-box solutions to maximize officers’ time and have non-sworn personnel respond to calls that don’t necessarily demand the presence of a badge and a gun.
The Storm
College of the Redwoods’ Police Academy once turned away scores of applicants, with its program capped at 40 students a semester. But, currently, it has just a dozen cadets enrolled. And that’s not a problem unique to CR. Academies across the country are reporting fewer applicants.
Nationwide, a Police Executive Research Firm survey earlier this year found departments were seeing an overall decrease of 5
percent in their hiring rates in the 20202021 fiscal year, with smaller departments reporting an average vacancy rate of near 9 percent. Perhaps most alarming, the survey found resignations increased 18 percent, while retirements were up 45 percent.
Ask local law enforcement leaders why fewer people seem to be going into policing and you’ll find there’s not shortage of answers. First, it’s a grueling job — one that generally necessitates nontraditional hours and witnessing high rates of trauma, all with the knowledge that returning home at the end of a shift isn’t a given. But those factors aren’t new and have always been inherent in policing.
But there’s no denying the climate around policing has changed. What started as the so-called “Ferguson effect” in reference to the 2014 police shooting of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown, spawning protests across the nation, rose to unprecedented levels in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s killing set off waves of protests across the nation and sparked intense dialogues about policing in America, with calls to “defund the police,” renewed scrutiny of the impacts of racial bias and increased demands for accountability in the profession, including the criminal prosecutions of officers who use excessive or unwarranted force.
“There’s an environment right now where they’re looking to make examples of cops,” EPD Chief Steve Watson says. “Throw this on top of what is already a really challenging job with often unrealistic expectations, and it’s a lot.”
APD Chief Brian Ahearn says he’d like to see an academic institution do some real research on the subject to find more definitive answers but agreed that technology and the push for police accountability have markedly changed the expectations of the job.
“The expectations now are almost unattainable in terms of having to be perfect every time and out on every call and in every situation,” he says. “We recruit and retain from the human race and humans are imperfect.”
And that extends way beyond critical incidents, Ahearn says, explaining that bodyworn cameras have become the industry standard, meaning an officer’s interactions will be dissected by their supervisors, juries and defense attorneys and the public,
with near perfection as the standard. That feeling of always being under a microscope, coupled with the push for police accountability — from prosecutions to civil lawsuits — could cause someone looking to make a positive difference in their community to choose a different career path, Ahearn says. “We have to be held to a higher standard — we have to,” he says. “We need to be judged about the service we provide and the manner in which we provide it, and that needs to happen not only inside the organization but outside as well. But does that require some soul searching, much more than when I decided to enter the profession 35 years ago? It probably does because you’re exposing yourself and your family to that degree of evaluation and scrutiny. It really can multiply the “Police pressure and stress on officers and their families.” departments Ahearn pauses for moment before concluding: are left “I think some people are choosing other occupatrying to tions when perhaps they would have chosen law strike an enforcement before.” The nature of policing impossible has also changed markedly in recent decades, as ofbalance.” ficers spend an increasing percentage of their time tasked with mitigating the quality of life impacts of homeless populations, those suffering from mental illness and grappling with addiction. Watson calls it the “tragic triad.” “The cops are there to fill the gaps in an under-resourced system,” he says. “You call and they’re going to respond. When I came into law enforcement, I had a picture in my head: I was going to be chasing bank robbers and arresting murderers and rapists. Well, the job today is so much more complex and wide, and we are being asked to do things that don’t meet the traditional mold.” Ahearn points out that the burden of these societal problems also continues to fall disproportionately to officers even as courts and lawmakers have repeatedly weighed in to say they should not be law enforcement issues. “Community police departments are left trying to strike an impossible balance,” he says. Over the past 18 months, officers have also been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, which officials say has added layers of stress, both from increased risk of exposure to just seeing more Continued on page 13 »
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