Police agencies around the world have been battling significant shortfalls of sworn staff, for reasons including the COVID-19 pandemic, police reform movements, and changing demographics and generational preferences. This staffing challenge is complex, multi-dimensional, dynamic, and global; it involves issues of workload, performance objectives, goal setting, allocation of resources, recruitment, selection, training, deployment, cohort management, retention, succession planning, culture, and strategy.

To address this challenge, it is not enough to simply boost hiring—calls for greater police diversity and skills, as well as research on police efficiency and effectiveness, remind us that the attributes of police officers matter as much as their number.

To foster collaboration on these issues, the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University has launched the Police Staffing Observatory (PSO). The PSO is a global collaborative of academics, scholars, practitioners, and students working to promote evidence-based police workforce research, strategy, and operations. Directed by Professor Jeremy M. Wilson, the PSO seeks to:

• coordinate timely and innovative research on critical aspects of a wide range of police staffing issues, leading to scholarly and practitioner-oriented publications;
• create a venue for the network of police staffing scholars to share opportunities, discuss ideas, and enable collaborations;
• facilitate researcher-practitioner partnerships and technical assistance; and
• serve as a repository and dissemination vehicle for the research of collaborators so that such research is easily found by practitioners and others.

“We currently have more than two dozen partners from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Iceland,” said Wilson. “By facilitating research and outreach, the PSO fosters a community of science that ultimately serves as a valuable resource for the community of practice.”

“The pursuit of democratic policing has traditionally focused upon the external-facing work that the police do,” said Sarah Charman, professor of criminology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, and a partner of the PSO. Charman added, “However, there is growing awareness that a closer analysis of policing’s most significant resource—its staff—and a focus upon fairness and justice within policing organizations can positively impact change. The establishment of the PSO is therefore a hugely important global initiative which will bring that keen focus to the array of issues concerning police staffing to foster academic and practitioner collaboration and ultimately contribute to organizational reform.”

Initial activities of the PSO have included the following:

• Development of a PSO website featuring collaborators, their published work, and current projects
• Creation of a LinkedIn page to bring awareness to collaborators and to serve as a mechanism for disseminating product information
• Establishment of a virtual forum for collaborators to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities (join the communication list)
• Promotion of the PSO by collaborators through participants’ networks

The PSO has already gathered more than 75 articles, guidebooks, reports, commentaries, and similar publications for the PSO resource page. These cover a wide range of topics such as staffing allocation, advancing diversity, benchmarking community representation to recruitment and retention strategies, recruit perspectives, and cohort management.

Such resources are particularly needed at a time when the police staffing crisis has become more acute. “A policing workforce crisis has been discussed in professional circles for several years,” said Scott Mourtgos, deputy chief of police with the Salt Lake City (Utah) Police Department, National Institute of Justice LEADS scholar, and PSO partner. “However, an increase in police leaving the profession and the resulting staffing crisis has become a more widely recognized concern in the time following the summer of 2020.”

In research with colleagues, Mourtgos found a 279 percent increase in voluntary resignations above expected levels for one large agency following the protests of 2020. “The diminished staffing levels many agencies are experiencing negatively impact the level of service [that] police agencies can provide to the communities they serve,” Mourtgos added.

One of the first new ventures of the PSO is a special issue, edited by Wilson and Toby Miles-Johnson of Western Sydney University, of Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice on the police staffing crisis. Other new ventures of the PSO include the following:

• Examination of voluntary resignations from the police in England and Wales
• Analysis of why individuals, particularly those of underrepresented groups, withdraw from the police academy
• Innovations in police recruitment and selection, research supported by the COPS Office
• The National Police Staffing Project, supported by the National Institute of Justice, examining the contemporary police staffing experience in the United States, and providing actionable lessons for police workforce management
• Analyses of officer retention and civilianization in the Baltimore City (Maryland) Police Department
• A systems approach to managing police staffing and workload demand
• Studies of how police officers manage their professional identity given changing views of the policing profession

Another forthcoming venture of the PSO is a proposed roundtable at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology. The roundtable will focus on the police staffing crisis, research issues, and perspectives of several partners. PSO collaborators will share insights regarding their ongoing research projects on police staffing and challenges, opportunities, and resources in advancing police staffing research and providing practical lessons.

“For reform-minded individuals with critiques of current policing practices, staffing levels adversely affect an agency’s ability to reform,” Mourtgos said. “Excellent policing requires excellent officers. Researchers and police agencies must begin to work cooperatively to understand the extent of the current policing staffing crisis, interventions to increase the recruitment of qualified applicants, and practices that assist agencies in retaining experienced officers.”

“Practitioners can benefit from greater access to researchers, researchers can benefit from collaborative opportunities with practitioners, and both can benefit from awareness of other work in this field,” Wilson said. “The PSO offers such opportunities to both practitioners and researchers. In doing so, it will also offer new, practical ways to address the police staffing crisis.”

Clifford Grammich, Ph.D.
Director
Birdhill Research and Communications
PSO Partner