Pool of Police Candidates Still Deep : Hiring increase need not sacrifice quality of officer recruits in such a large search area

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick has some concerns about whether the Los Angeles Police Department is being forced to hire too many officers too quickly.

“Have we put the Police Department in an overload situation? Are we starting to sacrifice quality for quantity?” Chick asked this past week.

Well, the answers, to us, are “no.” Such concerns are almost mathematically impossible at this stage of the effort to beef up the LAPD.

Such concerns are valid when a small jurisdiction is attempting a large increase for a police department that is substantial in size. By that we mean a locality in which the logical pool of likely police recruits has already been tapped out and officials are forced to look at folks that they would never otherwise consider.

Washington, D.C. (pop. 590,000) was a case in point. It was struggling to maintain a 5,000-officer police force at the same time that three suburban Washington governments were also rapidly increasing the size of their departments. Each of those three suburbs were bigger in terms of population than Washington proper. All three were more solvent, and had less crime. Thus, concerns about quality in the Washington police force were very appropriate.

If we had a police force of commensurate size here, in terms of our population of 3.2 million, the LAPD would have 42,351 sworn officers.

We will always share Chick’s concern for stamping out bias and maintaining high training standards. Right now, however, the second-largest city in the nation has 7,808 sworn officers, proportionally less than any other big city in America. In other words, we aren’t even laughably close to tapping the pool of credible officer candidates. That is especially the case given our region’s high unemployment rate. In other words, now is the time to compete strongly for the huge pool of potential new officers.