PSO Research In Progress
Police Retention Following Outrage Over Deadly Force: Evidence from California
Project Contact: Neil Filosa
Across the United States, police agencies report difficulties retaining officers. It is unclear whether there is indeed a widespread decline in police retention, and if so, which individuals and agencies are most affected. I study police officers in California using an individual-level administrative data set covering over 90% of the state’s police agencies. I show that police retention does decline substantially from 2014 to 2021 following national outrage over police use of deadly force. Retention declines are driven by officers exiting policing entirely, rather than transferring laterally to other police agencies. Pension eligibility strongly influences officers’ retention decisions, and retention decreases most for officers with more years of experience. I also investigate changes in retention across jurisdictions by income, race, and political preferences.
Women in Law Enforcement: Pathways to the Field and Experiences in It
Project Contacts: Samantha Clinkinbeard, Rachael Rief
Dr. Clinkinbeard and Dr. Rief are analyzing data from approximately 50 in-depth qualitative interviews with women in law enforcement, primarily in the Midwestern United States. Interviews were focused on women's pathways into law enforcement, successes and challenges on the job, and their thoughts on the recruitment, promotion, and retention of women as well as current realities of the policing profession. Women remain largely underrepresented in policing. By learning more about their experiences, we hope to provide insight into what motivates and keeps women in the field, what challenges they face and how they are managed.
Intergroup Communication Barriers in Recruiting Women Police officers
Project Contact: Shawn Hill
Police are often labeled as one homogenous group in all aspects, which is not a reflection of reality, and may contribute to the lack of diverse applicants (e.g. women). Simply put, people who would otherwise apply for the position may be unable to relate to the prototypical cop often seen in police recruitment videos and high-profile police incidents emphasized in the media. This project, in collaboration with researchers from the fields of criminology, psychology, and communication, examines recruitment of female police applicants through the lens of intergroup communication.
Development of an Early Warning System for Police Workplace Health and Performance.
Project Contact: Jacqueline Drew
Description: This project will build a comprehensive organisational model of police workplace health and performance. This project answers the call for immediate organisational reform of police workplaces. Police experience harm that must be addressed through organisational improvements, leading to more efficient policing. In this first of its kind study, this project will develop a practical early warning system that promotes strategic and front-line leadership capability of Australian police agencies in workplace health and performance. It will allow better identification of risk, resource allocation and tracking of these critical issues in policing.
Assessing the Need for Law Enforcement Staffing in Airports
Project Contact: Jon Shane
This research develops a framework and associated tool to help airports assess their individual needs to determine law enforcement staffing requirements. An activity-based budgeting model will be the tool by which they accomplish this goal (Grant was submitted to NATIONAL SAFE SKIES ALLIANCE, Program for Applied Research in Airport Security, PARAS 0055).
Examination of Voluntary Resignations from the Police Service
Project Contacts: Sarah Charman, Jemma Tyson
Professor Sarah Charman and Dr Jemma Tyson are currently analysing the data from 62 semi-structured interviews with people who voluntarily resigned from the police service in England and Wales between January 2021 and June 2022. We are particularly interested in analysing this data through the lenses of identity, voice and organisational justice. We have future plans to extend this to a particular focus on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic leavers, female leavers and those with an intention to leave. Learn more about initial findings from the project here.
Leadership for Wellness Strategy for Police Leaders: Development of Leadership Development Program focused on police mental health and wellbeing.
Project Contact: Jacqueline Drew
Description : While trauma has a role to play in understanding wellbeing outcomes, the focus on trauma has had the unintended consequence of diverting attention from the substantial adverse impacts we now know are being caused by workplace stressors. Organisational and operational stressors form a hidden ‘black box’ of potential harms, they have not been adequately acknowledged or addressed. For this reason, we call attention to leaders and leadership. Continued and persistent rates of psychological ill-health in our police and public safety agencies is fundamentally a people issue; it must go beyond simply providing support to staff who are negatively impacted by the workplace. Leaders create, or at least influence, many of the workplace factors that are associated with wellbeing. This project will build a police leadership development program to upskill leaders and support them in being ‘leaders for wellness’.
Withdrawal from the Academy
Project Contact: Ann Marie Ryan
Along with collaborators at the Michigan State Police and Baruch University, we are conducting a series of related investigations regarding why individuals, and particularly underrepresented individuals, withdraw from the Academy. In these projects we are examining historical data, interviewing leavers and stayers across multiple cohorts, and conducting an event sampling study to understand factors that lead those who accept a role in policing to leave early in their socialization and onboarding.
Innovations in Police Recruitment and Selection
Project Contact: Jeremy Wilson
With support from the COPS Office, we will conduct a five-part project to compile, develop and disseminate timely and innovative resources for police agencies to improve recruitment and selection, particularly of personnel whose skills and diversity facilitate community policing. Specifically, we will
- Search for and organize strategies, lessons, and information on police recruitment and selection. We will create a contemporary catalog of police recruitment and selection strategies and identify principles of building effective recruitment programs.
- Administer a focus group on strategy implementation and effectiveness. While the strategy catalog will help police benchmark their existing practices, they also need to know the context for each strategy and how to customize each to their community. Our focus group will yield insights on implementation and performance and rate different strategies for effectiveness.
- Facilitate a community of practice. More specifically, we will develop a share group among CHP awardees that revolves around monthly virtual recruitment and selection workshops, showcasing a specific topic and encouraging participants to share their specific experiences. We anticipate this will allow participants to expand their professional networks for discussing staffing challenges and innovations after this project concludes.
- Develop practitioner-oriented results. This will include five reports detailing the recruitment and selection catalog and corresponding assessment of strategies that we compile, two reports on building and maintaining recruitment programs, one recruitment and selection toolkit report for CHP awardees, and four outreach articles highlighting key discussions, resources, case studies, innovations, and lessons. We also anticipate creating additional summaries of key findings for publication in trade outlets and peer-reviewed journals.
- Market and disseminate lessons and resources, including through conferences and professional meetings, disseminating announcements of resources, distributing products and alerts to stakeholders, posting resources and products online, and engaging with external communications offices at Michigan State University and the COPS Office.
The primary goal of this project is to provide objective, independent, and practice-relevant knowledge and lessons to practitioners, researchers, and policy makers about the nature, changes, challenges, and solutions relative to police recruitment and selection."
Innovation in police gender equity management: Looking back, moving forward.
Project Contact: Jacqueline Drew
Description: This project aims to investigate gender equity recruitment and career support policies in all nine Australian and New Zealand policing agencies. A wide range of equity initiatives that have been implemented across police agencies will be examined, along with affirmative action measures including recent 50/50 male/female recruitment targets. The project will generate an advanced best practice model that can be used by domestic and international police agencies. This will allow police organisations to better manage equity issues and support a more inclusive and representative workforce. The benefits of this project are significant, they range from stronger police-community relations through to better service delivery by police.
The National Police Staffing Project
Project Contact: Jeremy Wilson
With support from the National Institute of Justice, we will execute a national platform of research that comprehensively and systematically
- Examines the contemporary police staffing experience.
- Assesses and provides actionable lessons on the nature, changes, challenges, and strategies associated with current workforce, recruitment, selection, attrition, retention, workload, promotion, job requirements, and training needs and requirements.
Our core tasks for this comprehensive national assessment are a nationally representative survey of police agencies and focus groups of POST directors, and case studies of participating agencies serving as benchmarks on their staffing efforts. Specific tasks include
- National landscape assessment, including personnel budget, levels, workload, and tasks.
- Training and certification assessment, including changes in hiring and certification standards and motivations for these.
- Contextual assessment of agencies selected for their diversity in staffing experience, size, region, partnerships, and enthusiasm to participate. For each case-study agency, we will conduct tasks 4 through 10.
- Recruitment assessment, including recruiter characteristics and outreach material.
- Selection assessment, including agency processes, and candidate flow and characteristics.
- Job assessment of case-study agencies, including a content analysis of open positions.
- Promotion assessment of case-study agencies, including their volume, diversity, and perceived barriers.
- Attrition assessment, including characteristics of those leaving the agency and why.
- Retention assessment, including strategies and perceptions of those staying.
- Program evaluation, including efficiency, process, and cost-effectiveness analyses.
- Deliverable construction and dissemination.
- Archive data.
This project will provide objective, independent, and practice-relevant knowledge and lessons to practitioners, researchers, and policy makers about the nature, changes, challenges, and solutions relative to the police staffing process, from recruitment, selection, and retention to training, promotions, and community representation.
Real-World Engagement & Turnover Analysis to Inform New Solutions (RETAINS): An Evidence-Based Policing Workforce Study
Project Contact: Gary Cordner
Baltimore Police Department will be included in a newly-funded project focused on police officer retention. The project is led by the Research Triangle Institute and the National Policing Institute and will be getting underway in 2023. Learn more about the entire project at the National Institute of Justice website here.
A Systems-Approach to Managing Police Staffing and Workload Demand: Translating Research into a Six-Step Process
Project Contact: Jeremy Wilson
Citing the COVID-19 pandemic, the police reform movement, changing demographics and generational preferences, and still other factors, many police agencies across the U.S. (and elsewhere) have been battling significant shortfalls of sworn staff. Calls for greater diversity and skillsets among police officers further complicate staffing efforts. Typically characterized as a recruitment or retention problem by various stakeholders, this oversimplifies the challenge, ignoring important factors and leading to piecemeal solutions.
For this literature application, I draw on three threads of research my colleagues and I conducted over the last two decades on staffing allocation, workforce profiles, and recruitment and retention. Collectively, this work on the development and maintenance of police workforces illustrates the interconnected nature of staffing to other critical issues, such as workload demand, performance objectives, staff supply and demand, workforce attributes, cohort management, demographic and generational shifts, and acute and systemic circumstances. I contend this work calls for considering “staffing” from a systems perspective and for staffing solutions to be more comprehensive, strategic and evidence-based. The purpose of this review is threefold.
First, I seek to establish that “staffing” operates in a broader ecosystem that must be considered when assessing the problem, contemplating goals and strategies, and implementing solutions. Second, I look to illustrate several of the important elements that comprise the police staffing system and should be considered. Finally, I use the body of work to form the foundation of a six-step approach for managing police staffing and workload demand. The lessons from this literature application should be of interest to practitioners and policy makers concerned about police staffing challenges and meeting community expectations and needs, and to scholars focused on police organizations and staffing issues.
Identity Management of Police Officers
Project Contact: Ann Marie Ryan
In this series of studies, Dia Chatterjee and Anne Marie Ryan examine how officers manage their professional identity in light of changing views of the policing profession. Project personnel employ interviews, surveys, and experimental studies in their work on this topic.
FOP Biennial Critical Issues In Policing Survey: A National Survey of United States Law Enforcement.
Project Contact: Jacqueline Drew
Description: First launched in 2021, the biennial survey of US law enforcement (active and retired officers) focuses on critical issues in policing, mental health, suicidal behaviours and wellbeing. The research provides critical insights into prevalence rates of mental health and wellbeing across the US police cohort, considers the key stressors impacting on officers and examines the availability, access and effectiveness of wellness services.
Activity-Based Budgeting with the Ocean View, DE Police Department
Project Contact: Jon Shane
Description: As a demonstration project with the Ocean View, DE Police Department, this research implements an activity-based budgeting model as a proof of concept, justifying hiring additional police officers for community policing and estimating costs when increasing the officers' proactive time from 67% to 75%.
Civilianization of the Baltimore Police Department
Project Contact: Gary Cordner
Baltimore Police Department is currently engaged in expanding civilianization. One element is 35 new civilian investigator positions. This is just getting underway in late 2022 with most hiring and training expected to occur in 2023. Learn more about the Baltimore Police Department’s civilianization efforts here.