Atlanta Shooting

When it comes to recruiting and training new officers, every additional requirement you impose for a new recruit (age, experience, education, police record, etc) is going to decrease the size of the "pool" from which you recruit.

After all, you can't "draft" people into the police force, so in reality, you don't have a choice of a cross-section of the population from which to choose your officers: You have a choice of those people who (a) actually WANT to be cops in that city or state, (b) are physically, mentally, and morally qualified and (c) make it through the screening.

The tougher the screening, the fewer that are going to make it thorough and the less choosy you can be about who makes the cut.

Unfortunately I don't think there's an easy answer or a simple solution here. I foresee a "Ferguson Effect" on a very large scale looming in the future, though, especially in major cities. Expect the police to slow-roll their responses to calls and to spend a lot of time doing "paperwork" in the donut shop parking lot.

Exactly right. Getting hired on as a cop isn't exactly as easy as I keep hearing it is lately. Arms a little more dear of getting your peepee slapped for being a thug would go a long way, and is relatively cheap and easy to put into place compared to more training and higher pay.

It depends on locality as well. Places over here on the western slope, I've heard 200+ qualified applicants per position is the norm.

But Houston or Minneapolis might have closer to 1:1 lol. Atlanta qualifies as a negative number.

I forget the exact numbers but when I was hired at the sheriff's dept in the late 80s there were 37 open academy slots with over 1800 applicants. When I decided I wanted to move to a PD I applied to over 20 depts before I got hired. Sometimes I'd get all the way to the final step before being told I didn't make the cut, sometimes the dept didn't even accept my application, and I was also let go at various stages in between. When I applied to the dept where I got hired they were looking to fill 5 spots with about 200-ish applicants. I was told not to waste my time as they had a reputation of being the hardest dept in the metro area to get hired on to. I breezed thru the application process, thought I'd for sure be let go after the polygraph because the examiner was an asshole and I pretty much told him that, but was then called on the same day as the polygraph and told to schedule my psych exam. Less than 2 months from application submitted to getting hired. I have no idea why it was so easy. I sat on two hiring boards and still don't understand why one person would get hired over another.

I've heard in some places there aren't even enough applicants to fill the open positions these days. I can't imagine why...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Great-Kazoo

texted the daughter about the walk out. She sent me this reply.

Yeah, I can't make it in. Exhibiting Covid related symptoms.

As soon as i can find a safe testing site and get the results. I'll be back

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Covid-911. New strain.

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Originally Posted by FoxtArt

It depends on locality as well. Places over here on the western slope, I've heard 200+ qualified applicants per position is the norm.

But Houston or Minneapolis might have closer to 1:1 lol. Atlanta qualifies as a negative number.

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It's just a guess but I would think that a lot of the most qualified patrol officers in the most contentious locations (Houston, Dallas, KC, St. Louis, etc) , that is the ones with the best resumes, are in the best position to apply for a cushy job with the Whiteyville PD way out in the suburbs. Sure, his colleagues might give him a hard time for moving to a department where "cat in tree" is the most exciting call of the night but at least he can be confident that he's less likely to be shot, stabbed, or worse yet, charged with homicide for a decision he makes in a split second.

So that officer leaves, and the overall level of experience on competence in that big city goes down incrementally.

In terms of numbers, as long as being a cop is a "good paying government job", the positions will likely be filled by SOMEBODY. But if it's seen as an increasingly low-prestige and high-stress and high-liability job, the quality of the applicants is only going to go down and I can't think that will do anything but INCREASE the tensions between the police and the people.

Undoubtedly, you could find hordes of qualified applicants anywhere at the right price level. There were US electricians contracting to go work in Iraq, for instance, where there's no code, no safety net, no documentation, everything is a haji'ed tangle of wiring, and great risk of life from the public. But they were paid something like $250,000/year for the risk (or maybe even more, I forget). People will pump shit for a pretty low wage (imho). Money is probably the biggest factor in choosing a line of work for the majority of people.

But, pay will also increase that personnel disconnect with the public if it gets too high. People often experience that with judges - salaries in the 150,000+ range, and the parties appearing often average under 30,000. You'd get to a point where people were bitching more about pretentious officers.

Greg Ellifritz just posted an excellent analysis of this shitshow. https://www.activeresponsetraining.n...rooks-shooting

Future Supervisory Police position:

Field Judge.

https://media.giphy.com/media/useUF6...facebook_s.jpg

Biggest message I could give to Atlanta or Minneapolis (if I had to talk to their mayor and city council) is that under the current circumstances, I would move to Thailand and live off my military pension rather than take a job that required me to live in their cities. Any city council that would even consider eliminating the police department based on a fraudulent organization's talking points, any DA that would even consider prosecution (much less actually filing charges against the police officer) in a case like this given the ample video evidence from the body cams, don't deserve my tax dollars and would be creating threats to my physical health and safety if I lived in those environs.