By Missy Wilkinson and John Simerman
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — When Anne Kirkpatrick took the reins as police chief in New Orleans a year ago, she laid out three priorities: Build on a downward trend in violent crime, reach full compliance with the federal consent decree that governs the force, and shore up depleted officer staffing, which she described as “a really big blister.”
Kirkpatrick has won praise on the first two fronts: Violent crime continues to trend steeply lower, and last week the U.S. Justice Department agreed for the first time that the NOPD is ready to move to the offramp of court oversight.
But Kirkpatrick has made no apparent headway on the third prong of her agenda. NOPD’s staffing has flatlined. And while she and others have pointed to a bright spot in a higher rate of applicants hired on as cadets, the department this year has seen a rash of dropouts from its Training Academy.
The latest to graduate, Class 201, produced just seven officers last month from the 25 cadets who started in March. That 28% graduation rate followed two previous academy classes that also ended much smaller than they started.
Class 200 ended in July with 10 graduates from a group of 23 recruits. And Class 199, which launched with 33 recruits in July 2023, graduated 19 in March.
Those numbers help explain why NOPD staffing remains virtually unchanged since Kirkpatrick came on as interim chief in September, 2023, despite millions of dollars in bonuses that have helped stanch attrition from the force.
Then, the department employed 896 commissioned officers and 52 recruits in the pipeline, a City Council dashboard shows. Since then, it’s down one officer and up two recruits.
Kirkpatrick had set a goal of adding a couple hundred officers, while the civic group NOLA Coalition set a target of 1,200 officers and projected it would take five recruit classes a year, with 35 graduates each, to replenish the ranks to that level by 2030.
NOPD officials say they haven’t given up on their ambitious staffing goal.
“Moving forward, there will be a focused effort on retooling our recruitment strategies to ensure we bring in the best of the best,” an NOPD spokesperson said in a Friday statement. “We are committed to finding and retaining the most qualified individuals who embody the values and standards that the New Orleans Police Department stands for.”
A closer look at Class 201
In response to questions, NOPD provided some details on the reasons so few graduated from Class 201.
Those graduates included two women and five men, the majority of them hailing from Louisiana. They include a former NOPD crime scene investigator and two recruits with military experience in the U.S. Army and Alabama Coast Guard.
Another 10 recruits didn’t make the cut this time but will be “recycled” into future academy classes, an NOPD spokesperson said.
The majority of those 10 didn’t cut it academically or failed at simulation training. Three were injured during training. One missed too many classes.
Four recruits couldn’t meet the physical standards needed to graduate: 29 sit-ups in a minute, 25 push-ups, and a 1.5-mile run in 16 minutes.
One recruit resigned. And three were terminated due to pending investigations—two administrative, one criminal.
Researchers weigh in
Researchers said it’s not uncommon for some cadets to drop out of police academy, but not at the rates seen lately with NOPD.
Ann Marie Ryan, a professor of organizational psychology at Michigan State University who has studied police academy dropouts, called that kind of attrition a costly sign that the department is struggling with its recruiting decisions.
“Those are people you’ve already deemed as qualified. These people look like the kind of people you want,” Ryan said. “You’re losing somebody you wanted, but also, potentially losing an investment of time and money.”
Often it’s family issues that trip up police cadets who end up dropping out, Ryan said. She also pointed to failures to meet physical benchmarks as a fairly common reason.
Gene A. Paoline III, professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida, says there’s no empirical evidence that those traditional physical fitness standards matter.
“A female police officer said, ‘I’ve been doing this job for years, and not once after I arrested someone did I have to run two miles,’” Paoline said.
Mateus Santos, associate professor in criminology at the University of South Florida, agrees that the NOPD’s staffing and attrition levels are “more severe than most places I have seen.”
His research, which focuses on recruiting efforts, points to a lack of information—including about the robust financial and personal benefits of the job—as a major deterrent for young people considering career paths.
“If you don’t have access to mentoring (from someone in policing), you have a misperception as far as benefits and challenges of being a police officer,” Santos said. “First, you have an overblown sense of risk... But the main misconception is the risk of liability.”
Tracking national trends
Like departments nationwide, NOPD has struggled with recruiting and retention in recent years due to a number of factors that criminal justice stakeholders and researchers are still working to unpack—among them national reverberations from the 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.
Big-city police forces have faced the worst of the losses, and they have been slowest to rebound in officer hiring, according to a recent survey by the national Police Executive Research Forum .
The survey found that the total number of sworn police officers increased this year for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but that police staffing overall remains about 5% lower. Large departments account for all of those losses. While police hiring has picked up overall, it remains flat at agencies with 250 or more officers, the survey found.
In New Orleans , a City Council dashboard using civil service data shows that officer applications, after rebounding last year, are on pace to fall below an abysmal 2022, when the department hired fewer than 30 officers and lost 154, an annual NOPD report shows.
‘Part of the change’
Ryan and other academics suggest changes in public perception have weighed on police hiring.
Gary Cordner, a former police chief and academic director at the Baltimore Police Department, said enrollment for its recruit classes dropped by half after Floyd’s killing.
“There was the sense that policing wasn’t a very honorable profession and if you go into that field and do anything wrong, you will end up on YouTube, and your life will be ruined,” he said.
The Baltimore Police Department, which is authorized for 2,600 officers, sits at below 2,000, Cordner said. But recruit classes have begun to swell to pre-pandemic levels, at around 40 each.
Cordner said he hopes a police staffing crisis is close to bottoming out. He said recruits he teaches arrive with a strong sense of purpose, attracted by the challenges of the past few years and the potential to make a difference.
“I think we might have turned a corner, for reasons I couldn’t begin to figure out,” he said, while pointing to his own start in law enforcement.
“I joined in the middle of the Vietnam War, (amid) strong anti-war sentiment, and the police were very unpopular because they had to deal with all that social unrest,” he said. “So during my era, the story was similar. A lot of people who signed up wanted to be part of the change.”
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