Academies in Oregon and Minnesota tell NR that anti-cop sentiment is having a profound effect on the size of their classes.
B ack in May, the leaders of the policing college in Alexandria, Minn., held a special luncheon for their students. A local business paid to cater it. Two members of the state legislature with law-enforcement backgrounds showed up to talk to the prospective officers.
The luncheon was a first for the school, which has been training Minnesota law-enforcement officers since the mid 1960s and is now one of the largest police-training centers in the state.
The purpose of the lunch was to thank the new graduates of the two-year program, and to encourage first-year students to come back and finish their degree, said Scott Berger, the coordinator of the program at Alexandria Technical & Community College, located about two hours northwest of the Twin Cities. Considering the dark cloud around policing in 2021, particularly in Minnesota, Berger felt like his students deserved encouragement.
“All they were hearing and what we were hearing from them was bad news. It’s like, ‘I don’t even know if I really want to do this.’ And we started noticing that our enrollment numbers were going down,” Berger told National Review.
While police departments have faced recruiting struggles for years, Berger said attracting candidates has been increasingly difficult over the last year and a half, starting with the chaos and classroom closures at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, and exacerbated by the riots and anti-police rhetoric after George Floyd died under a Minneapolis cop’s knee in May 2020.
Over the years, Twin Cities police officers have been the focus of often intense criticism for their involvement in fatal shootings of black men. That criticism intensified after Floyd’s killing, with elected leaders calling to defund and dismantle the Minneapolis police department and other law-enforcement agencies around the country. That rhetoric had an impact.
“What I heard from people that were contemplating getting into law enforcement . . . was that we don’t feel like there’s support for law enforcement right now,” Berger said. He described the climate last summer as a “transition time where everything in the news was bad news: All cops are bad, they’re not trained, they don’t know how to handle stressful situations or high-risk situations, which is just not true across the board.”
Berger said he’s seen a noticeable drop in enrollment in the school’s law-enforcement programs. According to data provided by the school, total law-enforcement enrollment at Alexandria Tech has been declining slowly since at least fiscal year 2017, when 401 students attended the policing programs. That number dropped to 349 in fiscal 2020, and 302 in fiscal 2021. At the beginning of the fall semester, Berger said, Alexandria Tech had only 117 freshmen starting the policing program. Normally they would have 140 to 180. Over the summer only about 100 students attended Alexandria Tech’s eight-week skills program. (Its summer program is for students from other schools that don’t offer the hands-on portion of the required training.) They would normally have 140 to 180 for that program as well, Berger said.
Jerry Granderson, director of the Oregon Public Safety Academy, said he, too, is seeing decreased interest in law enforcement as a profession. According to data provided to National Review, from 2016 through 2019 the Oregon academy averaged just under 500 students per year for their basic police and career officer-development courses, with a high of 606 in 2017. In 2020, the academy had only 290 students. According to the data received in late August, the academy has had only 177 students enroll so far this year.
Granderson said the drop in enrollment is likely “a function of multiple variants,” including pay. He acknowledged that one of the other variants is that “individuals may not want to come into this profession given the current social context.”
The nightly protests and riots in Portland last year were some of the most intense in the country, and were ongoing for months. Rioters regularly attempted to set fires at the Portland police-union building and launched projectiles — rocks, soup cans, balloons filled with feces — at officers. In June, every member of the department’s crowd-control unit resigned from the voluntary unit after one of their colleagues was indicted on an assault charge.
Granderson said law-enforcement leaders need to do a better job selling the profession to potential officers. They also need to acknowledge a historically troubled relationship with some minority communities, particularly the black community, and then write a new future with those communities, including moving from a warrior mentality to a guardian mentality.
“The bottom line here is, that message needs to be sent out that, listen, American people, we’ve heard, we’ve seen, we’ve adjusted. Please come into this sacred profession,” he said.
To up their recruiting numbers, some agencies may be tempted to lower standards, Granderson said. “I don’t think that’s a solution,” he said.
Berger agrees that law enforcement has historically done a poor job of marketing itself.
“Because we really, for a long time, never had to,” he said. “I mean, there were tons of candidates, and they were coming in, and new programs were getting started across the state. Everything was just wonderful and warm and fuzzy. And then, all of a sudden, the numbers start to go down and agencies are saying, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t have enough candidates.’”
In November, Minneapolis residents are expected to vote on a measure that could clear the way for the city’s police department to be replaced by a public-safety agency, with no requirement that it include actual officers. That’s the kind of measure that concerns today’s cops
Berger worries about the future of the profession. The way that lawmakers talk about policing, and the laws they pass that make policing harder and more personally perilous, help determine how those current offers talk about their work to potential candidates.
“Throughout history, our best recruiters are our past graduates,” Berger said. “Parents, kids, whatever, come up to them and say, ‘Hey, I want to go into law enforcement, what do you think?’ And they’d say, ‘Great job. If you’re going to go to school, go to Alexandria.’”
Berger said those officers still know the value of the work they do, but he’s hearing that they’re giving off a different message these days.
“They’re in favor of the profession, but they’re also realists,” he said. “So they look at it and say, ‘You know what, great job, great profession. You might want to just hold off for now.’”