It’s not like it used to be. Of that, Columbus Police Chief Tony Carleton is sure.
In a society where police work is infinitely more challenging, Carleton said it isn’t necessarily “harder” to find qualified officers to fill his roster. It does, however, take a little more reading between the lines.
Today’s police officers face a more technologically sophisticated criminal element, while also facing tougher media scrutiny and a citizenry who often doesn’t trust them. Plus, as incidents such as the May 9 shooting in Hattiesburg where two police officers were killed on a traffic stop starkly remind them, each day officers put on uniforms could be their last.
The ones who join police forces despite all that, Carleton said, do it with the knowledge that they probably will not get rich.
“They’re not here for the pay,” Carleton said. “They’re here to protect and serve. It’s my job to make sure they are properly trained to know why they are here.”
In fact, many full-time officers work second — sometimes third — jobs.
Officer Chris Ware, an 18-year law enforcement veteran who joined CPD last June, works in construction and mows yards on the side. His coworker, Mo Eguires who joined the force last fall, also teaches at the Law Enforcement Training Academy in Moorhead.
“We believe in work,” Ware said. “We have to.”
The recruiting and retention game has changed quite a bit, too, Carleton said, since he first started in police work. Part of that, he said, comes from the national spotlight on incidents like those in Hattiesburg, as well as attention to Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore and New York, where police officers killed unarmed suspects in the line of duty and sparked riots, outrage and conversations about the culture of police work.
Those things, combined with pay, long hours and any number of other factors, are keeping application volumes down all over the country, according to Carleton.
“It’s not just us, but the number of people who are applying to be police officers is down nationwide, and those situations haven’t helped,” he said. “Statistically, you still have a greater risk of being raped or assaulted than you have of an officer mistreating you. If you’re in trouble, you’re gonna call 911 and you’re going to want the police to show up.”
When applications do come in, Carleton sometimes wades through generation-gap issues before he can determine who is right for the job.
On the positive side, Carleton said “millenials,” those who became adults after the year 2000, understand technology far better than their predecessors and have a greater tendency to think outside the box. Those skills prove invaluable, according to the chief, and make young officers a stand-out commodity.
However, on the other side, Carleton said he sees an element among the millennials that sometimes puts instant gratification above teamwork.
“Young officers today are coming from a generation where everybody on the soccer team got a trophy, win lose or draw, and that’s not reality,” he said. “You’re not always going to win, you’re not always going to get the new car, and you’re not always going to get the first pick on job detail. We’re looking for mature people, and we try to dig deep enough in our recruiting to see if applicants have good morals, ethics and work ethic. There are lots of challenges that way.”
Once officers come on the force, Carleton said it can be just as big a challenge to keep them.
He said officers typically deal with 10 percent of the population (the criminal and at-risk element) 90 percent of the time, so they are used to people lying to them. That can sometimes cause officers to become jaded, he said, and forget that the majority of the population doesn’t behave illegally.
“If an officer doesn’t see a positive light in their job, his or her morale drops, and a lot of great officers leave the profession because of that,” Carleton said. “It’s the supervisor’s responsibility to recognize when that starts to happen, and then try to take steps to prevent it. We have to show them that everybody is not bad.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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