With rising violence in urban areas and thousands of police officers leaving their jobs because of immense negative publicity stereotyping “all” police officers for the sins of a few, we are looking at the impairment of urban areas in terms of jobs, economic development, record-setting fear of crime, diminishing student test scores and the dismantling of any sense of safety for children.
The ability to retain experienced officers and questions about the quality of their replacements may have major impacts on the welfare of cities.
Author
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.
Retired federal senior spokesperson. Thirty-five years of directing award-winning public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Interviewed multiple times by every national news outlet. Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of Criminology and Public affairs-University of Maryland, University College. Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Certificate of Advanced Study-Johns Hopkins University. Former police officer. Aspiring drummer.
Author of ”Success With The Media: Everything You Need To Survive Reporters and Your Organization” available at Amazon and additional booksellers.
Article
Articles and media reports of police officers leaving the job seem to be a daily occurrence. Cities throughout the United States are stating that there is a crisis regarding police officers quitting with predictable results as to their ability to provide services. It’s taking hours to respond to incidents and that includes violent crimes. Cities are providing an array of events they will no longer respond to or they are sending civilians to take reports.
What’s below is created with the permission of Jeff Asher and his excellent website offering recent data on crime and police operations. I supplement his data with previously written articles addressing the same issue.
Larger Agencies Shrank-Jeff Asher
“There has been tons of ink spilled on police losing officers since 2020 and the 2022 data helps to quantify some of that change. 16 of the city and county agencies with the most officers in 2019 shrank by 2022. Note, for this entire analysis I’m not counting agencies that are not the primary law enforcement agency for a county or city (like State Police or Highway Patrol) and I’ve removed agencies that didn’t report any data in 2019. That leaves 10,345 agencies with data for both 2019 and 2022.”
Chart
There were 27 cities that had 500 or more officers in 2019 and lost greater than 10 percent of their officer total by 2022. Only 3 cities, by contrast, had 500 or more officers in 2019 and grew by 10 percent or more by 2022.
Smaller Agencies Didn’t Really Shrink
There was a pretty good correlation between agency size and change in officers from 2019 to 2022. Smaller agencies — which make up the vast majority of American law enforcement agencies — largely grew or stayed about the same. Larger agencies, especially agencies with 1,000 or more officers, tended to shrink.
Previous Data On Police Officers Leaving From Crime In America
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that we have lost 12,353 “local” police employees between September 2019 and September 2021. In addition, 1,361 state police officers have left. Editors note, I will update this data this summer.
Law enforcement agencies are offering civilians instead of police officers for many calls.
Some agencies are replacing leaving police officers with recruits they consider unqualified.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police surveyed its members in 2019 and found that 75% were experiencing greater recruitment challenges, with 25% reducing or eliminating some services as a result.
“Data from NYC Police Pension Fund data obtained by Fox News Digital show 1,955 members on the force retired in 2022 and another 1,746 quit, meaning a total of 3,701 left the ranks last year alone. It’s the largest figure recorded in the last 20 years, even higher than in 2020 and 2021, when the massive amount of officers leaving the force dominated national headlines. There were a total of 2,811 NYPD members who quit or retired in 2021, and 3,315 in 2020.”
“Philadelphia and New Orleans showed similar problems. And in Baltimore, a judge warned last month that the police staffing crisis in the city is so dire that it can’t be “overstated.”
Arrests are plummeting. There were over 4.53 million arrests for all offenses in the United States in 2021. This figure is a decrease from 1990 levels when the number of arrests was over 14.1 million.
Nationally, 60,105 law enforcement officers were assaulted while performing their duties in 2020. These assaults were reported to the FBI by 9,895 law enforcement agencies (editor’s note, out of 18,000 police agencies-thus an undercount). Based on these reports, there were 4,071 more officers assaulted in 2020 than the 56,034 assaults reported in 2019.
Finally, the rates of police officers are shrinking. The use of civilian personnel dramatically increased by 65 percent.
Conclusions
There’s no doubt that urban crime has increased considerably. Since 2019, homicides are up by 50 percent. Aggravated assaults are up 36 percent per the Major Cities Chiefs Association. The risk of violent street crimes rose by 40 percent. Fear of crime is at an all-time high.
There is concern that “under-policing” leads to increased crime. Recent research finds that increased police staffing helps to prevent crime, primarily through deterrence, in medium and large cities.
Traditionally, criminology suggested that law enforcement tactics had little impact on crime and violence. Today, we know that to be untrue via data from CrimeSolutions.Gov and research on proactive policing.
With rising violence in urban areas and thousands of police officers leaving their jobs because of immense negative publicity stereotyping “all” police officers for the sins of a few, we are looking at the impairment of urban areas in terms of jobs, economic development, record-setting fear of crime, student test scores and the dismantling of any sense of safety for children. The ability to retain experienced officers and questions about the quality of their replacements may have major impacts on the welfare of cities.
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