Recommended Best Practices
Recommendation 10.2 Seek community input when making decisions about hiring and re-source allocation.
Departments need adequate staff to meet their many obligations: answering service calls, investigating serious crimes, responding to emergencies, and more. Officers in understaffed departments cannot carry out their missions or serve their communities well. They are often stretched thin and worked to the point of exhaustion, which is dangerous for officers and the public alike.
Uses of force are correlated with overtime. If an officerworked one additional hour of overtime in the prior week, the odds of a use-of-force incident in the following week increaseby 2.7 percent.[i]
Officers who work back-to-back shifts, meanwhile, receive more public complaints.[ii]And, some people argue that officers are slow to respond to calls for service or investigate violent crime in some communities, suggesting that some departments should hire more officers to meet needs in these communities. Data indicate that adding more officers reduces crime, not because additional officers conduct more stops or arrests but because fewer people commit crime when officers are around.[iii]
Yet many communities don’t want more police, especially communities of color that are overpoliced and subject to the aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses. The sentiment among many people of color is that they’re better off with no police than living in fear of police violence, and that they should instead be empowered to solve their own problems.[iv]
Some communities that have a lack adequate funding in other areas, such as education, housing, health care, and public transportation, don’t want to see increased spending on police, and support an invest/divest approach.[v]Under this framework, elected officials are called to invest in holistic health services and treatment, education, housing, and living wages, which more effectively reduce crime than policing or incarceration.[vi]
Investing in adequate police staffing levels, however, does not have to come at the expense of other community investments. Communities, department leaders, and elected officials should take a holistic approach to staffing that considers proposed spending on new hires and other department expenses alongside community needs and competing interests.
To do so, leaders should work with communities and elected officials to analyze underlying societal problems that contribute to crime. When determining whether to hire more officers in locations with high volumes of service calls, leaders might consider hiring mental health professionals and social workers to handle incidents involving people with mental health and developmental disabilities or substance use disorders, or investing in “diversion programs” to prevent people from entering the criminal justice system and reduce police involvement in public health issues. (For more detail, see Chapter 5.)
Department leaders should also engage with communities when making budgetary decisions. They should:
- Collaborate with community officials to identify services that don’t require police-based responses.
- Seek community and officer input when assessing staffing needs, identifying unfilled vacancies, and adjusting staff numbers based on projected population changes in their communities.
- Summarize key findings and recommendations about staffing and resources and share them with elected officials who make budget decisions (g., mayors, city managers, and members of the city council).
- Provide opportunities for communities to debate department recommendations and how — and whether — to implement them.
[i]Justin Anderson, et al., King County Sheriff’s Office Overtime: Better Strategy Could Reduce Hidden Costs and Safety Risks, King County Auditor’s Office 30 (2017), https://www.kingcounty.gov/~/media/depts/auditor/new-web-docs/2017/kcao-overtime-2017/kcao-overtime-2017.ashx?la=en.
[ii]See Matthew Yglesias, The Case for Hiring More Police Officers, A Crime-Fighting Idea that Actually Works, and New Exclusive Polling Shows It’s Popular Across all Racial Groups, Vox (Feb. 13, 2019, 9:00am), https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/hire-police-officers-crime-criminal-justice-reform-booker-harris.
[iii]See id.
[iv]See Mychal Denzel Smith, Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality. When People Ask Me, “Who Will Protect Us,” I want to Say: Who Protects You Now?, The Nation (Apr. 9, 2015), https://www.thenation.com/article/abolish-police-instead-lets-have-full-social-economic-and-political-equality/; Maya Dukmasova, Abolish the Police? Organizers Say It’s Less Crazy than It Sounds. Grassroots Groups around Chicago Are Already Putting Abolitionist Ideas into Practice, Chi. Reader, https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-abolitionist-movement-alternatives-cops-chicago/Content?oid=23289710 (last visited Feb. 17, 2019).
[v]See generally Freedom to Thrive Reimagining Safety & Security In Our Communities, The Center for Popular Democracy, Law For Black Lives, Black Youth Project, 4, 26, 38, 42, https://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Freedom%20To%20Thrive%2C%20Higher%20Res%20Version.pdf.
[vi]See generally Freedom to Thrive, supranote 23, at 3.