U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

Law Enforcement 

Recruitment Toolkit

Law Enforcement 

Recruitment Toolkit

COPS/IACP Leadership Project

June 2009

This project was supported by Grant Number 2005-HS-WX-K003 awarded by the Office of 

Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions contained herein 

are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the 

U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services 

should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.

The Internet references cited in this publication were valid as of July 2009. Given that URLs and web sites 

are in constant flux, neither the authors nor the COPS Office can vouch for their current validity.

 iii|

Letter from the President

Dear Law Enforcement Colleagues,

Recruiting and staffing shortfalls continue to plague law enforcement agencies across the United States. 

New challenges in the 21st century, including military call-ups, a greater number of retirements, homeland 

security obligations, and increased competition, have combined to make the problem more acute. While 

many agencies are struggling, others are moving forward with innovative approaches. 

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has partnered with the Office of Community 

Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office) in the COPS/IACP Collaborative Leadership Project to 

bring these innovative recruitment techniques to the fore through a new publication, the Law Enforcement 

Recruitment Toolkit. 

The toolkit comprises four reports, each focusing on a different area of recruitment. The lead piece, Police 

Recruitment: Foundation Concepts, describes police departments’ changing recruitment needs, the obstacles 

that stand between the departments and their recruitment goals, and the strategies that some jurisdictions 

are using to overcome those obstacles. Each subsequent report, Recruiting for Diversity, Agency Collaboration 

in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection, and Community Partnerships in Police Recruitment, explores a 

specific approach to recruitment and provides specific examples of successes in these areas.

Recruitment issues have been the focus of much of the work of the IACP for a number of years. This toolkit 

is one step among many in addressing the recruitment needs of the field. The issues of police recruitment, 

selection, and retention are critical to the advancement of community policing and the policing profession 

in general. We hope this toolkit will serve as a valuable resource for law enforcement agencies, their 

administrators, and others in the community committed to advancing community policing. 

Sincerely,

Russell B. Laine

President, IACP

Chief of Police, Algonquin (Illinois) Police Department

 v|

Acknowledgments

The IACP is indebted to a number of people who lent their time and talent to make this toolkit possible. 

We thank the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office), particularly former 

Director Carl Peed, for determining the need for this toolkit and for providing both financial and 

programmatic support. We are especially grateful to Senior Policy Analyst Albert Antony Pearsall III 

who served as our project monitor. He was actively involved throughout the evolution of this project and 

provided valuable ideas, guidance, and support. 

We are grateful to the hundreds of police agencies that responded to the IACP’s recruitment survey, the 

results of which helped to frame this toolkit. We additionally thank those respondents who were willing to 

share their recruitment materials and resources.

A number of subject matter experts served as reviewers and/or contributing authors for this project. 

Their efforts were essential in framing and developing this toolkit, and we are greatly appreciative of their 

contributions.

Ronald McBride

Andrew Morabito

Gregg Walker

David Bostrom

Steve Loyka

Peter Regner

IACP Diversity Coordinating Panel.

IACP Staff:

Dan Rosenblatt

Executive Director

James McMahon

Deputy Executive Director

Jerry Needle

Director, Programs and Research Division

Kim Kohlhepp

Manager, Center for Testing Services 

and Executive Search

Phil Lynn

Manager, National Law Enforcement Policy Center

John Markovic

Program Manager 

Tracy Phillips

Senior Project Specialist.

Finally, we wish to thank two COPS Office contractors: Judith Beres, for editing the toolkit; and Nancy 

Carlsen, for the publication design.
The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office) is the component of 

the U.S. Department of Justice responsible for advancing the practice of community policing 

by the nation’s state, local, territory, and tribal law enforcement agencies through information and 

grant resources. 

Community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies which support 

the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to proactively address the 

immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear 

of crime. 

Rather than simply responding to crimes once they have been committed, community policing 

concentrates on preventing crime and eliminating the atmosphere of fear it creates. Earning the 

trust of the community and making those individuals stakeholders in their own safety enables law 

enforcement to better understand and address both the needs of the community and the factors 

that contribute to crime.

The COPS Office awards grants to state, local, territory, and tribal law enforcement agencies to 

hire and train community policing professionals, acquire and deploy cutting-edge crime-fighting 

technologies, and develop and test innovative policing strategies. COPS Office funding also 

provides training and technical assistance to community members and local government leaders 

and all levels of law enforcement. The COPS Office has produced and compiled a broad range of 

information resources that can help law enforcement better address specific crime and operational 

issues, and help community leaders better understand how to work cooperatively with their law 

enforcement agency to reduce crime.

•	 Since 1994, the COPS Office has invested more than $12 billion to add community policing

officers to the nation’s streets,enhance crime fighting technology, support crime prevention

initiatives, and provide training and technical assistance to help advance community policing.

•	 By the end of FY 2008, the COPS Office had funded approximately 117,000 additional

officers to more than 13,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the

country in small and large jurisdictions alike.

•	 Nearly 500,000 law enforcement personnel,community members, and government leaders

have been trained through COPS Office-funded training organizations.

•	 As of 2009, the COPS Office has distributed more than 2 million topic-specific publications,

training curricula, white papers, and resource CDs.
 vii|

Contents

CONTENTS

Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts .................................................................3

State of Police Staffing.................................................................................3

Changes in Police Recruitment Needs.............................................................4

Factors That Hinder Police Recruitment ............................................................5

Unfavorable Demographic and Social Trends...................................... 5

Lack of Diversity in Some Police Departments....................................... 5

Unattractiveness of Paramilitary Organizations..................................... 6

Intense Competition for Candidates................................................... 6

Bureaucratic and Burdensome Personnel Regulations............................. 6

Strategies to Improve Recruitment ...................................................................7

Collaborate with Other Police Agencies............................................. 7

Engage the Community................................................................... 7

Improve Relations with External Human Resource 

Offices and Elected Officials .................................................... 8

Streamline Your Recruitment and Selection Process................................ 9

Involve Everyone in the Department in Recruitment ...............................10

Put Someone in Charge of Recruiting................................................10

Tell the Police Story .......................................................................10

Enhance Web Outreach ................................................................12

Enlist the Support of the Media........................................................12

Reach Out to the Young .................................................................13

Hire Younger—and Older ..............................................................13

Hire Transitional Workers ...............................................................13

Mentor Applicants Through the Process .............................................14
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|viii

Appendix: A Closer Look at the IACP Recruitment Survey .................................15

Methodology ..............................................................................15

Analysis of Structured Survey Questions.........................................................16

Key Baseline Questions..................................................................16

Open-Ended Questions..............................................................................20

Overall Recruitment Challenges .......................................................20

Other Hard-to-Recruit Groups ..........................................................26

Nonsworn Recruitment Challenges ...................................................26

Recruiting for Diversity..........................................................................................29

Objectives and Focus................................................................................30

Diversity as a Changing Concept ....................................................30

Benefits of Diversity .......................................................................32

Obstacles to Recruitment of Women and Minorities ........................................32

How to Increase the Diversity, Number, and Quality of Recruits .........................33

Create Leadership Vision and Clear Organizational Commitment ...........33

Gauge the Current Organizational Climate........................................35

Selection: How to Increase the Diversity and Quality 

of New Officer Classes ...........................................................41

Retention and Advancement and Their Relationship to Recruitment ..........44

Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection ...........................47

How to Collaborate with Neighboring Agencies to 

Improve Recruitment............................................................................47

Reach Out to Neighboring Agencies............................................................47

Start Small...............................................................................................48

Become More Sophisticated ......................................................................48

Establish a Regional Recruiting Organization .................................................48
 ix|

Contents

Regional Collaboration in New Jersey: The Alternate Route Program ..................49

A County Case Study: Alternate Route in Morris County .......................50

A County Case Study: Alternate Route in Camden County ....................52

Regional Collaboration in Florida ................................................................55

Pinellas County’s PASS...................................................................56

Brevard County’s Police Testing Center..............................................59

Recommendations from the California POST Commission .................................62

Develop a Recruiting Team .............................................................62

Find Out What Potential Applicants Want .........................................62

Market the Agency and Use Technology............................................63

Consider Alternative Staffing and Employee Preparation .......................63

Create Partnerships.......................................................................66

Market the Agency .......................................................................66

Enhance Community Outreach ........................................................66

Become More User-Friendly ............................................................66

How to Prepare Recruits to Succeed in the Police Academy..............................66

Hiring in the Spirit of Service ..........................................................67

A Public-Private Partnership and an Applicant-Friendly 

Web Site..........................................................................................70

Community Partnerships in Police Recruitment .......................................................75

Why Community Inclusion? ........................................................................75

Who Is the Community?.............................................................................76

How Do We Engage the Community?..........................................................77

Phase 1: Building-Block Activities.....................................................78

Phase 2: Stakeholder Action Planning...............................................80

Phase 3: Implementation, Monitoring, and Evaluation ..........................81
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|x

What Can the Community Do? ...................................................................82

Recruitment..................................................................................82

What Are the Challenges of Community Collaboration? ..................................85

Apathetic or Busy Community Members.............................................85

An Insufficient Pool of Potential Participants ........................................86

Expectations................................................................................86

Follow-Through.............................................................................86

Resources................................................................................................86

Appendix A.............................................................................................87

Appendix B ...........................................................................................101
POLICE RECRUITMENT: 

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

 3|

POLICE RECRUITMENT: 

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

In the United States, each jurisdiction served by the nation’s approximately 18,000 state and local law 

enforcement agencies determines how many sworn and nonsworn police employees it requires and can 

afford to hire, equip, train, and deploy. It falls to each agency to fill those positions with qualified employees. 

Police executives generally agree that staffing their agencies is their most important administrative 

responsibility and perhaps the most difficult. Meeting the other operational challenges—terrorism, gang 

proliferation, a methamphetamine epidemic, offender reentry—depends on having enough officers and 

civilian employees on the job.

State of Police Staffing

Law enforcement agencies in the United States employ more than 1 million persons. The U.S. Bureau of 

Justice Statistics (BJS) says that state and local police agencies employ roughly 730,000 sworn officers and 

345,000 civilian workers, and the nation’s 65 federal law enforcement agencies outside the armed forces 

employ approximately 105,000 sworn officers.1

In recent years, several factors have created an unusually high number of vacancies in police departments, 

according to anecdotal evidence from the field. Police officers called to active duty with military reserve units 

and the National Guard left their posts to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some veteran police officers, lured 

away by higher pay, separated from public service to pursue security work at big corporations or to take 

police trainer positions with contractors overseas. Officers from state and local agencies accepted positions 

with federal agencies that were ramping up to fight terrorism. Baby boomer officers who joined the police 

force in the 1960s and 1970s began retiring in high numbers. The general view among police leaders is that 

recruitment has not kept pace with the changes.

Stories of police agencies that are operating at less than full strength are easy to find. The Houston Police 

Department, which in 2006 had an authorized strength of 5,389 sworn officers, reports that its officer 

vacancies have risen sharply, from 51 unfilled positions in 2004 to 424 in 2005 and up to 605 in 2006. Its 

2006 police academy class, its largest in at least 6 years, had just 236 members.2

 The New York City Police 

Department recently missed its recruitment goal by 2,000 officers, creating what Commissioner Ray Kelly 

has called a “crisis.” News accounts put California’s police staffing shortfall at 15,000 officers across 600 state 

and local agencies. In Macon, Georgia, a municipal police department authorized for roughly 300 sworn 

officers has 65 vacant officer positions.

These high-profile shortfalls notwithstanding, it is not clear how many police employment positions go 

unfilled nationwide in a given year. The most recent available data about police hiring suggest that state 

and local police departments, as a rule, are recruiting enough officers to offset losses caused by retirement, 

termination, or resignation, according to BJS statistician Matthew Hickman. “The total [state and local 

police] employment figure at June 30, 2003, includes 51,466 new hires including 7,669 lateral hires over 

the prior 12 months,” Hickman wrote in a 2006 article. “There were 48,866 total separations from police 

employment. The balance of new hires and separations results in an overall net gain of 2,600 officers, or 

0.4 percent during the 12-month period.”3
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|4

In a recent survey of members of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), only a small 

percentage of respondents reported that their agencies are experiencing a severe staffing shortfall. When 

the data are weighted for agency size, the agencies of the survey respondents are operating with an average 

93 percent of authorized sworn officer positions filled. Approximately 16 percent of agencies reported that 

the current number of sworn officers was less than or equal to 90 percent of authorized capacity, and about 

3 percent of the agencies were under 80 percent authorized-capacity. (For a closer look at the method and 

results of the survey, see the Appendix.) 

These figures suggest that police departments in the United States are in general doing an adequate job of 

recruiting new employees. But in recruitment, as in most other respects, the nation’s police agencies vary 

widely. In other words, police recruitment is not a monolithic phenomenon. While some agencies recruit 

with seeming ease, others struggle to meet their goals, and some agencies experience unpredictable ups and 

downs in recruitment.

The findings of the IACP survey help clarify our understanding of the state of police recruitment. For 

instance, 70 percent of survey respondents believe that recruitment is more challenging than it was 5 years 

ago. Slightly more than half of the respondents report that their agencies receive fewer applications now 

than they did in years past, a trend police leaders have emphasized in recent years. In 2006, Mary Ann 

Viverette, retired chief of police in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the 2005-2006 president of the IACP, told 

National Public Radio, “Most of us are seeing that our pools of [police officer] applicants have dwindled. 

Where we might have . . . gotten 300 applications for one position, now [we] may only get 50 to 75.”4

 In 

Kentucky, the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Division of Police reports that applications for police 

officer positions with the department have declined steadily, from a recent high of 1,600 in 2002 to 756 

in 2006. During that period, the department grew from 490 authorized sworn officers to 570 and had 20 

unfilled positions at the end of 2006.5

Changes in Police Recruitment Needs

The goal of police recruitment is, and always has been, to hire not merely enough people but the right 

people. But police executives’ notion of what constitutes the right people is changing. They now are more 

likely to seek to increase the diversity of their departments across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, gender, 

age, and sexual orientation. 

For an earlier generation of law enforcement executives, hiring officers and civilian employees who 

reflect the community they serve simply meant recruiting more women, Blacks, or Hispanics. For today’s 

executives, it may also mean recruiting employees who can speak Spanish, Hmong, Cape Verdean Creole, 

or a variety of other languages or dialects. Storm Lake, Iowa, is just one of the many small U.S. towns 

undergoing an immigration-driven transformation. The presence of good jobs and good schools has drawn 

newcomers from countries in Africa, Asia, and Central America. The chief of police in Storm Lake, Mark 

Prosser, wrote in the pages of The Police Chief that 63 percent of the children in the public elementary school 

were minorities, many of whom spoke little or no English at home. Public safety officials in Storm Lake now 

recruit aggressively among members of the many immigrant groups that are putting down roots in that city.
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

 5|

POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Going beyond racial, ethnic, and national diversity, police executives also seek employees who have expertise, 

such as computer skills, that police recruiters might not have looked for in a police officer a few years ago. 

A growing number of criminal cases, including felonies of all types, rely at least in part on digital evidence—

e-mail messages and Internet browsing records, for instance—and officers and civilian employees who have 

an aptitude for computer investigations have immense value to police departments. Also on many agencies’ 

wish lists are employees who can learn how to turn information into intelligence, conduct statistical analysis, 

make effective presentations to community groups, work with children, or manage volunteer programs.

Factors That Hinder Police Recruitment

Just as the police recruitment experience varies from one jurisdiction to another, so do the causes of 

recruitment difficulties. The nature of the law enforcement officer’s job—shift work, hazardous duty—

understandably limits its appeal. Police work isn’t for everyone. But other factors could discourage persons 

who might otherwise apply for police work, even as demographic trends appear to compound the problem 

by limiting the size of the pool from which law enforcement recruits its new members. 

Unfavorable Demographic and Social Trends

Policing is vulnerable to demographic trends that affect the number of persons of eligible age for police 

service. America’s population is aging, and declining birthrates have produced a series of smaller cohorts 

between ages of 21 and 35, the target age for new police officers. The average American family has fewer 

children today than it did a generation ago, creating a scarcity of children. Parents may be more reluctant 

than ever to encourage them to enter a line of work considered dangerous.

Police executives report that many traditional applicants fail to qualify because of drug use and ethics 

concerns that surface during background investigations, psychological assessment, or polygraph exams. 

U.S. Navy Vice Admiral John Cotton, commander of the Navy Reserve, recently told a gathering of senior 

military officers that “72 percent of American youth between 17 and 24 years of age are not eligible for 

military service [because of ] fitness, academic and law enforcement deficiencies.” He noted that some 30 

percent of boys drop out of high school.6

 Because the military and the police draw recruits from the same 

labor pool, it is reasonable to believe that fitness-for-duty factors that exclude young men and women from 

military service may also exclude them from police employment. Nevertheless, there is little support among 

police chiefs for lowering standards.

Lack of Diversity in Some Police Departments

The underrepresentation of minorities and women police officers in some departments creates a shortage 

of role models for recruitment of these populations. Police chiefs must make agency diversification an 

organizational core value that is understood and embraced by all members if they are to find a force that 

accurately reflects the composition of the community.
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|6

Unattractiveness of Paramilitary Organizations

The nature of the U.S. system of policing causes confusion among those who may consider police service as 

a career option. The military appearance and structure of many police organizations is not always attractive 

to potential recruits who seek socially responsible work. To them, the police department may look more like 

a domestic army than a community service agency. The entertainment and news media portray police as 

primarily militaristic and combative, and police recruiters often reinforce this misperception by producing 

and distributing recruitment tools that focus exclusively on the tactical aspects of policing without regard 

to its service component. Such an image tends to attract applicants who expect a police career to consist 

primarily of thrill-filled days engaged in high-risk endeavors. 

Recruitment efforts should focus on drawing people who are committed to serving in the spirit of service 

and possess the mental, intellectual, emotional, and physical attributes that will allow them to prevail when 

faced with a high-risk incident. The goal should be to select those committed to the role of policing in a 

free society and to exclude those motivated mainly by thrill seeking. Community policing helps create and 

maintain trust levels that serve the interests of the community and agency. This trust leads to relationships 

that are more likely to attract potential applicants to a career in police service. 

Intense Competition for Candidates

Private security firms are also drawing employees from the same labor pool as police officers and they are 

recruiting them sooner. Because most private-sector security officers do not have the power of arrest or carry 

a firearm, firms can hire officers as young as age 18, years before they would be eligible for employment in 

public-sector policing. The private security industry is growing rapidly. At the same time, some jurisdictions 

are changing concealed-carry laws to allow private security to be armed, blurring the line between private 

security and public policing.

Police recruiters in some instances are competing head-to-head with military recruiters. Like private security 

firms, the military can offer entry into a career at age 18, whereas most police agencies require a new officer 

to be at least 21. In years past, the police industry benefited from a significant segment of the population 

that served, voluntarily or otherwise, in the U.S. military for a few years and returned to civilian life with 

an interest in continued service in something akin to the armed forces. This made police work an attractive 

employment option. Today, it is unclear how an all-volunteer military affects police recruitment. 

Bureaucratic and Burdensome Personnel Regulations

Cumbersome civil service laws hamper modern human resource practices. Many agencies lack the flexibility 

to accelerate the testing cycle. Applicants are often subjected to repeated visits to participate in stages of 

the selection cycle. A superbly qualified candidate may be lost to another employer that is able to test and 

assess the candidate and make a firm job offer in less time. Of course, any change to civil service laws must 

be made with the knowledge that many of these laws are designed to protect applicants from abusive 

employment patterns and practices. But there is a need to streamline and improve the recruitment, selection, 

and employment process while preventing a return to practices that often gave preferential treatment for 

employment. 
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

 7|

POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Many agencies are still bound by a legal requirement that applicants be citizens of the United States, some 

by a state residency requirement, and a lesser number by rules that mandate residency in the jurisdiction 

served by the agency. The citizenship requirement has limited the efforts by some agencies to employ 

individuals who have a mastery of languages other than English. Added language ability is essential to 

implement both intelligence-led policing and community oriented policing. A policy like that of the U.S. 

military, which does not require U.S. citizenship, could be of value in police recruitment. It could also 

improve police service to new immigrants who cannot speak, read, or write English, a disenfranchised group 

that is especially vulnerable to criminal victimization. Police executives should use their influence with 

elected officials to foster constructive change in this arena.

Strategies to Improve Recruitment

Many effective recruitment practices are described more fully elsewhere in the IACP Recruitment Toolkit, 

but the following list can serve as a starting point for agencies seeking both more and better applicants.

Collaborate with Other Police Agencies

Effective police recruitment exceeds the capacity of any one agency. Continuing the use of fragmented 

recruitment strategies and tactics is self-defeating for the police profession. Police leaders should seek ways 

to cooperate with each other to maximize their effectiveness. Consolidation of police services is not likely 

in most cases, but the door is open to interagency cooperation. Many agencies are in an all-out bidding 

war for police applicants and some recruitment teams are crisscrossing the country looking for applicants. 

Their effort may be admired, but the results are questionable, as applicants move from bidder to bidder. 

Police leaders must collaborate to protect the United States; they must do the same to staff America’s police 

agencies.

Engage the Community

The city of Hartford, Connecticut, experimented with community engagement as a means to improve police 

recruitment of minority officers. Citizen focus groups helped police identify a primary barrier to recruitment, 

namely, the lengthy period between an applicant’s expression of initial interest and the offer of a job.

 In the mid-1990s, Lexington, Kentucky, lost some community support in the wake of an officer-involved 

shooting, two lethal-force incidents, and a charge of biased traffic enforcement. The chief of police supported 

a move to overhaul the police recruitment, selection, and training program and enlisted the help of a citizen 

minority recruitment committee. 
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|8

The lesson learned in both Hartford and Lexington is that police leaders can benefit by making police 

recruitment a community concern. Community support can help lower the obstacles to progress, and shared 

responsibility can increase the likelihood of political support for needed changes. A police leader should 

increase community awareness of the recruitment problem and then include community representatives 

in defining and minimizing actions or steps that adversely affect this activity. The leader who engages 

the community as a full partner is likely to increase the opportunity to enrich the agency through broad 

diversification. Community representatives can provide a better understanding of cultural impediments 

to successful participation in the selection process. The community is more likely to encourage potential 

applicants to seek a police career if they know from hands-on experience that the recruitment and selection 

process is as open and fair as possible. Community representatives can also serve as knowledgeable mentors 

to help marshal applicants from the day they express a casual interest in policing to the day they became a 

newly sworn police officer.

Community engagement can be a slow process as awareness is created, volunteers come forward with a 

willingness to serve, and the grinding work is undertaken to reengineer a failed system or to upgrade an 

already workable system. Community representatives must believe that they are full partners in solving a 

local crisis. Citizens can provide an agency leader with informed counsel and the support to forge change. 

Involving the community should include more than just developing the recruitment process and using 

citizens to lobby potential applicants to participate. Citizens should also have a voice at the selection step.

Improve Relations with External Human Resource Offices and 

Elected Officials 

In some jurisdictions, the authority to recruit and select government employees is housed outside the police 

department. Many communities have centralized their human resources functions, while others use external 

bodies such as commissions and civil service boards to hire personnel. As such, a police leader may be an 

outsider to the very process that is highly critical to future performance of the agency. This can be a serious 

impediment to solving the recruitment problem. 

External bodies and organizational units tasked to handle employee recruitment and selection may not be 

overly concerned about employing qualified personnel committed to the spirit of service. If such a situation 

exists, it is the police leader’s responsibility to overcome it. The executive must understand both the legal 

foundation and the practices that govern the recruitment and selection of police officers. If the process 

is in need of improvement, it is the executive’s task to forge partnerships committed to making system 

improvements.

The nature, scope, and intensity of police recruitment problems warrant total government commitment. 

Such a commitment begins with the highest-ranking elected official and administrator. These positions may 

be one and the same, as in a strong mayor form of government, or separate, as in a city manager style. In 

either case, the obligation to engage government leadership rests with the police executive. He or she must 

provide compelling evidence for political commitment and involvement by the local governmental leadership 

and obtain a commitment from them to work toward a long-term, lasting solution. 
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

 9|

POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Political involvement does not end with the government chief executive officer or chief administrative officer. 

It rightfully must include members of the legislative body. A police executive must take care to follow legal 

or accepted protocols that will allow direct contact with the legislative body. This certainly is the case in 

many city manager governments and also may be true in strong mayor forms. The legislative body needs to 

have full understanding of the nature and scope of the problem. Anything less may result in the denial of a 

budget request that is essential to support police recruitment.

Intragovernment communication, by law or practice, may flow from the police executive to the mayor or city 

manager to the governing body. Similar practices are frequently found at the county and state levels and are 

intended to aid in the separation of powers. The most notable exception is sheriff ’s offices that have direct 

access to the governing body. City councils or commissions frequently designate a member or subgroup to 

provide police oversight. In such systems, the police executive has an opportunity to launch awareness efforts 

and build consensus and momentum to move a decision to the legislative body for consideration and action. 

The same is true in communities that are served by an independent police commission or similar body. 

Independent civil service commissions and merit boards in some communities are committed to the goals of 

agency diversity and quality staffing. In other communities they can form impediments to needed changes. 

Recall that the civil service and similarly named entities came about in large part in response to complaints 

about unfairness in the recruitment, selection, and retention of police and fire personnel in particular. Often 

these bodies have a limited number of professionals on staff and the sitting officials of the commission or 

board frequently serve pro bono. The police leader is obligated to work with these bodies in such a manner 

as to minimize resistance and political battles. Elected officials and appointed government leaders should 

be made fully aware of actions proposed by a police leader that require consideration by a civil service 

commission or merit board.

Streamline Your Recruitment and Selection Process

Police departments are often burdened with cumbersome recruitment and selection processes that can 

frustrate applicants and drive them to seek other employment. Common characteristics of weak recruitment 

processes included systems that were designed to select out (exclude) rather than select in (include) a 

candidate. In effect, the process is designed to find reasons not to offer an applicant a job rather than identify 

reasons to employ. The most effective recruitment and selection processes are those that are completed 

quickly and allow a candidate to move swiftly from application to employment decision points. Some 

agencies have reengineered police selection and recruitment as a one- or two-day event, commonly over a 

weekend, from first assessment to conditional offer of employment. At the other end of the spectrum, some 

systems can take a year or more to complete the process.

An understanding of recruitment and selection is essential if improvements are to be made. Monitoring 

every applicant at each step in the process is necessary. Applicant elimination points should be identified 

and meticulously scrutinized to ensure that exclusion decisions are based on failure to meet essential 

selection standards. The monitoring begins at the point of initial interest and continues until an applicant 

completes preservice and field officer training and satisfies requirements to be confirmed as a career status 

officer. This recognizes that recruitment and selection does not end until an officer has completed his or her 

probationary employment period satisfactorily. 
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|10

Involve Everyone in the Department in Recruitment

A total-agency approach nearly always is the best course in problem solving. Law enforcement agencies 

are watched closely by the media and others, and reports of disagreement between police management 

and labor often create confusion in the community and can cause good programs to fail. Preliminary 

efforts to engage the entire agency in the task of developing recruitment strategies and tactics will increase 

the chances for success.

Put Someone in Charge of Recruiting

Commitment to meeting recruitment goals starts with the chief, but every agency, regardless of size, should 

have one person who has lead responsibility for police recruitment. In agencies with fewer resources, the 

recruitment task may be ad hoc. 

Regardless of agency size, the person assigned to serve as a recruiter will require training. A recruiter needs 

to be conversant with applicable federal and state laws, maintain impeccable ethical standards, and stay 

focused on the mission of marketing the agency to the community while soliciting potential applicants. 

Favoritism or any other ethical breach has the potential of destroying community goodwill and exposing 

the recruiter and the agency to claims of wrongdoing. The selected recruiter needs intimate knowledge of 

the agency’s personnel recruitment goals as well as deep commitment to the value of diversity. Even after the 

chief has given an employee direct responsibility for recruitment, all employees must still recognize their 

obligation to be recruitment ambassadors for the department.

Tell the Police Story

Perhaps the greatest task facing the police community is to tell the police story. Many Americans undervalue 

police service. “You can never find a cop when you need one,” they say, usually when they mean “I don’t want 

the police to be visible unless they serve my immediate purpose.” Police leaders must develop and implement 

a plan to communicate an honest portrayal of police work directly with the American people. This is not 

going to be an easy task and the greatest challenge likely will be obtaining broad support, consensus, and 

cooperation from police executives.

Branding the police will require reaching agreement on the common purpose and responsibilities of the 

police. Are police officers crime fighters, service providers, homeland security agents, peacekeepers, mental 

health workers, or community problems solvers? In truth, police officers are all of these things and many 

more. Branding most professions is relatively simple, for comparatively speaking their scope of responsibility 

is narrow. But police officers handle problems that often have medical, legal, educational, and many other 

components; therefore, branding the police requires a collage of images and messages. Care must be taken 

to present a balanced picture of police work. Police leaders seek applicants who are honor-driven, are 

committed to community wellness, and possess the necessary attributes to deal with critical incidents and 

tragedies. When the situation arises, officers must have the wisdom to apply only that level of force that is 

reasonably necessary to stop a criminal act, a unique power afforded only to police officers in the civilian 

work environment. 
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

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POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Developing a marketing communication strategy that tells the true story of policing will offset media 

accounts of policing that are all too often negatively slanted or sensationalized. Telling factual stories of 

dedicated service by honorable police officers also values those who serve in the profession and increases the 

likelihood that potential applicants will be drawn to a career in police service. 

Few law enforcement agencies have a coordinated marketing communication strategy. 

At best, some have developed limited efforts to portray police work. Some of these efforts are done 

exceptionally well, while others send confusing messages about policing as a career. Far too many of the 

promotional pieces focus excessively on the tactical aspects of police service. While police agencies require 

a tactical component, this is certainly not where an officer spends most of his or her time. Police service is 

more about problem solving than crime fighting, and potential applicants must understand in practical terms 

the very special trust, responsibility, and obligation that society has placed in them. 

With a lack of guidance, most agencies are left to their own devices. Police leaders need to explore the 

formation of collaborative efforts that maximize the value of marketing tools while minimizing the costs to 

individual agencies. This requires that agencies rethink how they approach the problem of police recruitment. 

The American police system does not intrinsically encourage cooperative ventures, but police recruitment 

demands a broad response that should begin with sharing resources toward the common good. 

Forming a police recruitment consortium may provide business synergy that enables development of creative 

marketing tools that are easily adaptable by many police agencies. Such a practice provides an opportunity 

for cost containment. To accomplish this, it is important that graphics and message points are consistent 

across the array of marketing tools, such as the use of PowerPoint, CDs, pamphlets, posters, business 

cards, and the like. Public advertisement and web-based marketing should match hard-copy materials and 

electronic products. Marketing tools require close monitoring to ensure that message points are consistent 

and reflect current conditions. 

At least one new nationwide marketing effort has been deployed: “Discover Policing” (www.discoverpolicing.

org), a Bureau of Justice Assistance–funded IACP project designed to attract a qualified, diverse population 

of workers who possess the values and skills essential to law enforcement. The web site features descriptions 

of the personal and professional benefits of the law enforcement profession and serves as a conduit between 

prospective candidates and hiring agencies.

Discover Policing addresses a series of obstacles in police recruitment, including marketing. Today, agencies 

must create their own marketing campaigns to attract candidates, and few have the marketing resources to 

compete with better-funded employers in other fields. Discover Policing markets policing as an attractive 

and personally rewarding career choice for young applicants, persons seeking a career change, and others 

who may not have considered a career in law enforcement.

Beyond improving the image of policing, Discover Policing is also intended to broaden the field of potential 

candidates. Law enforcement competes with the military, the fire service, nursing, and teaching for a 

finite number of willing workers. Each of these fields attracts people who are answering the call of public 

service. A larger portion of these individuals can be recruited into policing with the right message, and 

DiscoverPolicing.org is designed to deliver that message.
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

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Operational since November 2008, DiscoverPolicing.org aims to be the premier source of information on 

the Internet concerning policing as a professional option. Linked with this career information database is 

a full-featured career center, including current job openings and the capability for candidates to post their 

resumes and apply for jobs online. 

Enhance Web Outreach

In general, police agencies have harnessed the power of web-based communications effectively. Home pages 

are well-done and attract visitors looking for quick information or desiring to learn more about crime in a 

particular community. Some police agencies have done an exceptional job of exploiting the power of the web 

while others have yet to fully use this new tool. Using the web for police recruitment can bring much of the 

global labor pool to an agency’s electronic front door.

Sharing information over the web requires a high level of attention to detail. Information must be current, 

relevant, and consistent with the agency brand. The web allows an agency to easily accommodate a casual 

visitor interested in police service as well as the serious applicant seeking information, clear guidance, and 

a path to follow from initial interest to the application and through the selection process. Personnel needs 

and recruitment goals should be stated clearly, as should applicant standards. A user-friendly recruitment 

and selection process encourages participation. After visiting a web site, visitors, at a minimum, should 

know whether an agency is seeking applicants and should understand its recruitment goals, standards and 

candidate requirements, recruitment and selection processes, wage and benefits package, and basic job 

rules. They should also have had the opportunity to submit a statement of initial interest online or clearly 

understand how to make an application. 

Enlist the Support of the Media

Much of the media are aware of police staffing problems, but generally do not understand their shared 

responsibility to solve the problem. Police executives should reach out to their media contacts to discuss the 

nature and scope of the challenges of recruiting police officers. Staffing shortfalls sometimes expose a police 

executive to media-driven criticism that officers are leaving because of poor pay and benefits, low morale, 

excessive overtime, or officers’ safety concerns, or that the community is being endangered because of police 

personnel shortages. Proactive intervention with the media may rectify or blunt such criticism and serve to 

engage the media in finding workable and affordable solutions. 

Media outreach should involve more than the news media. One should consider using public-access 

television channels, some of which have developed production capacities that equal those of commercial 

broadcast channels. They can provide an opportunity to go directly before a community to talk about issues 

requiring community action. A chief appearing as part of a diverse community panel discussing police 

recruitment goals can open the door for full or community engagement.

 One should also consider using talk radio. The Nielsen Media Research web site can tell a police executive a 

great deal about media readership, viewers, and listeners. This information allows a police leader to direct his 

or her message to the entire community or drill down to a specific segment or niche of the population. 
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

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POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

It is common for police executives to meet with reporters regularly. Such meetings provide another 

opportunity to increase awareness of the police recruitment problems and how they affect the agency and 

the community, and provide another means for soliciting assistance from the community to resolve the 

problem. In addition to the agency CEO, other police personnel who regularly meet with the media should 

be armed with the agency’s talking points regarding police recruitment. 

Reach Out to the Young

Children tend to think of police officers as friends and protectors, and many express a desire to be one 

someday. But, as they grow up, many lose interest in policing, and some even lose their faith in the police. 

It is in the best interests of the police and the community to change that trend. Agencies have built on 

children’s positive view of police officers using a variety of tactics. They include participation in National 

Police Athletic Leagues/Activities Leagues Inc., police cadet programs, and Law Enforcement Explorers, 

among others. At the least, police officers will help a future generation of citizens and taxpayers understand 

the importance of law enforcement. Better still would be to nurture a budding crop of future officers.

Hire Younger—and Older

Some agencies have modified their personnel employment rules to permit hiring applicants before 

they reach the minimum hiring age, which commonly is 21. Young hires are often enrolled in the police 

academy with a scheduled graduation date that coincides with their age requirement, allowing them to be 

commissioned as police officers. Other agencies find nonsworn support positions where a qualified applicant 

can work, earn, learn, and be readily available to continue in the selection process.

Laws and regulations in many jurisdictions bar agencies from hiring entry-level police officers beyond a 

specific age. Police executives in those jurisdictions should use their influence and collective voice to bring 

about a change in those laws if they exclude potential candidates for reasons that are not warranted.

Hire Transitional Workers

The police industry needs to take a hard look at hiring transitional workers. Many skilled professionals 

who have left careers in fields such as teaching, aviation, and medicine because of mandatory or preferred 

retirement dates still have a desire to serve. Others have grown stale in their current job and are seeking 

a new challenge. Empty nesters may be another group seeking a new opportunity as family financial 

obligations decrease. They have knowledge and skills that are desperately needed by the police industry. The 

police community would do well to welcome them to police work as long as they meet duty requirements. 

Police leaders can be in a position to know when local employers are going to lay off workers in the wake of 

mergers, buyouts, and relocations. The police leader who has useful information about the labor market can 

move quickly to attract quality personnel. 
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

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Mentor Applicants Through the Process

In addition to streamlining its application process, a police agency needs to establish a personal relationship 

with applicants from the start. After all, these people will become coworkers and eventually leaders of the 

organization. A welcoming and supportive attitude will pay dividends in the long run. Supporting applicants 

includes accepting the fact that some may fall short at first, but they should be encouraged to continue 

involvement. A promising applicant need not always be excluded from employment because of a deficiency 

that could be overcome with additional preparation. An agency mentor working with such an individual 

should focus on building on the applicant’s strong attributes and fortifying detected weaknesses.

1.	 Bureau of Justice Assistance, Police Census 2004, press release, July 2007.

2.	 Unofficial figures supplied by Lieutenant Frank Rusinski of the Houston Police Department’s Recruiting Unit.

3.	 Hickman, Matthew,“Impact of the Military Reserve Activation on Police Staffing,”The Police Chief 73 (October 2006), August 12, 2007.

4.	 Siegel, Robert,“Big City Police Departments Face Recruit Shortage,” National Public Radio, All Things Considered, aired March 21, 2006.

5.	 Unofficial figures supplied by Captain Michael Blanton of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Division of Police.

6.	 Quoted in Navy Times, June 21, 2007.
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

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POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Appendix: A Closer Look at the IACP Recruitment Survey

As a modest next step in the research into recruitment problems across law enforcement agencies of 

different types, sizes, and locations, the IACP administered a short, opportunistic recruitment survey to its 

members. The survey was designed with four closely related objectives in mind: 1. to better understand the 

current scope of the recruitment problem; 2. to determine how recruitment challenges and successes vary 

across agencies; 3. to determine whether the situation is changing for better or worse; and 4. to solicit input 

about the unique challenges being experienced by individual agencies and the innovative and promising 

solutions they are implementing in response to these challenges. In addition, the survey addressed general 

concerns about recruitment as well as concerns specific to diversity recruitment and efforts to recruit 

particular demographic groups.

The IACP’s opportunistic research sample was relatively small and unscientific. Nevertheless, the survey is 

noteworthy because it is timely and because the sample is a reasonable representation of IACP member agencies. 

Methodology 

In October 2007, the IACP distributed a recruitment survey to agency heads through e-mail notification 

and a link to an online survey. The distribution list was drawn from the IACP’s membership database 

and included only members who were identified as chiefs, sheriffs, superintendents, or executive officers 

of another kind. The IACP sent approximately 4,300 e-mail messages and received 628 valid responses 

within 3 weeks. The e-mail message encouraged recipients to complete a short recruitment survey or to 

forward the survey to an appropriate designee in the recipient’s agency for completion. The IACP made no 

follow-up attempts to reach persons who did not respond within 3 weeks. The 15 percent response rate, 

while not ideal, is in line with survey research that relies on more persistent follow-up to nonresponders. 

Respondents represented a diverse cross-section of law enforcement agencies of various types, sizes, and 

geographic locations.

The IACP recruitment survey consisted of both fixed-response questions, using a Likert-type scale, and 

open-ended questions. This format allows researchers to conduct quantitative analysis about recruitment 

challenges as well as collect content-rich information about the unique circumstances individual agencies 

are facing and the varied strategies, both formal and informal, they have implemented to address 

recruitment challenges.
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Figure 1: Survey Respondents by Agency Size.

Number of Authorized Full-Time Sworn Employees

Number of 

Survey 

Respondents

Figure 1: Survey Respondents by Agency Size

0

10 or fewer

74

11–25

154

26–50

153

51–100

114

20

108

101–1,000 More than 

1, 000

50

100

150

200

Analysis of Structured Survey Questions

Key Baseline Questions

Two baseline survey questions with Likert-type scaled responses addressed the adequacy in the number of 

candidates applying at the agency and the degree to which recruitment was more or less difficult than it had 

been 5 years ago. Results are in Figure 3. 

Responses to the first baseline question indicate that just over half (53 percent) of agencies reported fewer 

(38 percent) or far fewer (15 percent) candidates than needed applying as sworn officers. About 31 percent 

indicated an adequate number of applicants but only 16 percent reported more (11 percent) or many more 

than needed (5 percent). These findings confirm that recruitment shortages are common but not universal. 

Agencies that report attracting too few candidates outnumber those attracting too many by a ratio of 6.6 to 1.

With respect to the second question, about 70 percent of respondents to the IACP’s recruitment survey 

indicated that recruitment has become either somewhat more difficult (44 percent) or much more difficult 

(26 percent). About 20 percent of respondents said recruitment was about the same as 5 years ago, and only 

about 9 percent reported that it was either somewhat easier (6 percent) or much easier (3 percent) to recruit 

now than it was 5 years ago.
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

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POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Figure 2: Survey Respondents by State.

Legend

Count of Survey

Respondents by State

	 •	 1 – 6

	• 7 – 15

	• 16 – 24

	• 25 – 34

• 35 – 52

14

17

52

3 2

15

5

1

3

16

10

10

4

2

2

22

12

19

1

3

14 16

8

6

14 4

24

12

31

1

11

23

5

21

17

34

14

4

6 12

26

18

34

1

17

2

6

5

45

Percent of authorized capacity

In addition to the two baseline questions, respondents were asked to report the current number of 

authorized sworn positions for their department and the number of full-time sworn positions filled at the 

time the survey was administered. Across all agencies with valid responses (n = 619), findings confirmed 

that shortages were more common than overages. The average percent of capacity was 96 percent, adjusted 

to 93 percent when weighted by agency size. Approximately 16 percent of agencies reported that the current 

number of sworn officers was less than or equal to 90 percent of authorized capacity, and about 3 percent 

were less than 80 percent authorized capacity. About 35 percent of respondents were at or above authorizedcapacity, of which only 3 percent were above authorized capacity.

Figure 3: Baseline Recruitment Questions and Responses.

Baseline Recruitment Questions 

and Responses UNFAVORABLE CONDITION — NEUTRAL — FAVORABLE CONDITION

(1) How would you describe the number 

of candidates applying for employment as 

sworn officers in your agency?

Far fewer than 

needed

Fewer than 

needed

An adequate 

number More than needed Many more than needed

15.3% (96) 37.6% (236) 30.7% (193) 11.0% (16) 5.1% (34)

(2) Compared with 5 years ago, which of 

the following best describes the difficulty of 

your current recruitment efforts?

Much more 

difficult

Somewhat more 

difficult About the same Somewhat easier Much easier

26.3% (165) 44.5% (279) 20.1% (126) 5.9% (37) 3.2% (20)
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|18

Figure 4: “How would you describe the importance of diversity in your overall recruitment strategy and 

efforts?” Responses Across All Agencies and by Agency Size.

Importance of Diversity in Agency's Overall Recruitment Strategy

75.0%

54.6%

39.5%

39.9%

23.2%

23.0%

37.6%

15.0%

30.6%

31.6%

28.1%

25.8%

16.2%

26.7%

10.0%

13.9%

26.3%

26.8%

37.7%

44.6%

28.6%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

> 1,000 Auth. FT-Sw n

101–1,000 Auth. FT-Sw n

51–100 Auth. FT-Sw n

26–50 Auth. FT-Sw n

11–25 Auth. FT-Sw n

<= 10 Auth. FT-Sw n

ACROSS ALL AGENCIES

Agency Size in Sworn-Personnel

Percent Distribution of Responses

Extremely Important Of moderately high importance Moderately important Not very important Not at all important

Figure 4."How would you describe the importance of diversity in your overall recruitment strategy and efforts?" 

Responses Across all Agencies and by Agency Size.

Diversity questions

The IACP recruitment survey inquired about the general importance of diversity in the agency’s recruitment 

strategy, as well as about challenges an agency was experiencing with specific demographic groups identified 

by the survey. Regarding diversity questions about particular demographic groups, respondents were 

given the option to treat individual questions as “not applicable” if the named demographic group was not 

represented in their community. 

Providing a general perspective on diversity recruitment, IACP’s survey findings revealed that diversity 

recruitment overwhelmingly is considered an important strategy among most of the agencies responding. 

While this holds true regardless of agency size, respondents from larger agencies tended to rate the 

importance of diversity even more highly. About 93 percent of respondents across all agencies indicated 

that diversity recruitment was at least moderately important, with 38 percent indicating it was extremely 

important and 29 percent indicating it was of moderately high importance. Considering responses across 

agency size, the percentages responding that diversity recruitment was of at least moderate importance 

ranged from 84 percent for the smallest agencies to 100 percent for the largest.

Findings on recruitment challenges for specific demographic groups

In recent years, many law enforcement agencies have sought to reach out to demographic groups that 

historically have been underrepresented in law enforcement agencies, most notably African-Americans, 

Hispanics, and women. Depending on local population demographics, diversity recruitment efforts also have 

been designed to reach out to other locally represented minority groups, such as Asians and Native Americans.
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

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POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Figure 5: “Please indicate the level of difficulty your department has experienced over the last 2 years in 

recruiting candidates from the following groups.”

Figure 5. Please indicate the level of difculty your department has experienced over the last two years in recruiting 

candidates from the following groups."

Prevalency of Recruitment Challenges for All 628 Survey Respondents

61

150

70

217

152

306

103

15

154

186

212

136

194 252

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

White

Native Hawaiian or Pacific 

Islander

American Indian or Alaska Native

Asian

Hispanic or Latino

Female

African-American or Black

Demographic Group

Number of Agencies Indicating Challenge

Moderate Challenge Count

Major Challenge Count

RESPONSE PREVALENCE BY GROUP

To accommodate for variation in minority representation of minority groups in local demographics, 

questions about diversity recruitment were analyzed in two manners. First, simple counts were tallied to 

represent prevalence of challenges across demographic groups specified on the survey. This addresses the 

general question of with which demographic groups do law enforcement agencies in general most frequently 

experience recruitment challenges? Recognizing that demographic composition differs across agency 

jurisdictions, and that many law enforcement jurisdictions do not have substantial representation of all 

minority groups, population-adjusted comparisons were also made.

For each demographic group, prevalence (approach 1) represents the number of agencies that responded that 

they experienced moderate or major challenges recruiting the designated group during the last 2 years. The 

most prevalent groups identified with diversity recruitment challenges were African-Americans, women, and 

Hispanics. Expressed as percentages, 71 percent of responding agencies reported challenges (moderate or 

major) in recruiting Blacks, 70 percent in recruiting women, and 68 percent in recruiting Hispanics. 

These three demographic groups were similar in the prevalence of agencies reporting recruitment difficulty, 

but the proportion of responses that indicate major challenges versus moderate challenges are markedly 

different for some groups. A roughly equal number of agencies reported some degree of challenge in 

recruiting African-Americans, women, and Hispanics, for instance, yet the recruitment of AfricanAmericans was more likely to be considered a major challenge. 

As an alternative measure, analysis focused on challenges across demographic groups but adjusted for the 

presence or absence of demographic groups in particular communities (as reported directly by respondents). 

This approach adjusts for the fact that demographic groups (aside from women) may be represented in 

vastly different proportions among the populations of communities coinciding with police jurisdictions. 

All other things being equal, departments are more likely to report challenges with African-Americans and 

Hispanic recruitment because they are the minority groups most likely to be represented in substantial 

numbers across more jurisdictions.
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

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Comparison of recruitment challenges based on population-adjusted percentages presented in Figure 

6 differs appreciably from those presented in Figure 5. Looking at communities where representation is 

relevant, recruitment challenges associated with less-represented minority groups such as Asians and Native 

Americans present similar levels of challenge for recruitment as with Blacks when those groups are present 

as residents of the community.

Figure 6: “Please indicate the level of difficulty your department has experienced over the last 2 years in 

recruiting candidates from the following groups.”

candidates from the following groups." Population-Adjusted Comparison by Group

Major Challenge Moderate Challenge No Challenge

POPULATION-ADJUSTED COMPARISION OF RECRUITMENT CHALLENGES 

Analysis includes ONLY agencies where specified group is reported as present in community 

22%

38%

50%

56%

45%

47%

49%

39%

30%

25%

37%

36%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

White

Female

Hispanic or Latino

Native Hawaiian

or Pacific Islander

American Indian

or Alaska Native

Asian

African-American 

or Black

Demographic Group

Percent of Responses

2% 24%

Open-Ended Questions

Overall Recruitment Challenges

A review of the open-ended responses addressing general recruiting challenges indicated that the most 

prevalent comments centered on candidate quality and candidate quantity. 

Many respondents also identified competition from both neighboring agencies and other local industries, 

particularly those offering better salary and benefit packages, as a major challenge to recruitment.
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

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POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

While some smaller, more rural agencies felt disadvantaged by their size or location, others capitalized on 

those assets by touting themselves as either a “training agency” or as a place for older or family oriented 

officers to “slow down” or “downsize” from larger departments. (This comment also noted under “innovative 

diversity recruitment methods.”)

Figure 7: “Describe the most significant challenges your agency has had in its overall recruitment efforts.”

CASES

INCLUDED EXCLUDED TOTAL

N % N % N %

None or Blank 28 4.5 601 95.5 629 100.0

Misc 11 1.7 618 98.3 629 100.0

Applicant Quality 346 55.0 283 45.0 629 100.0

Applicant Number 86 13.7 543 86.3 629 100.0

Salary/Benefits 98 15.6 531 84.4 629 100.0

Competition 131 20.8 498 79.2 629 100.0

Small, Rural, or P/T agency 30 4.8 599 95.2 629 100.0

Education Requirement 26 4.1 603 95.9 629 100.0

Diversity 53 8.4 576 91.6 629 100.0

Budget/Resources 31 4.9 598 95.1 629 100.0

Housing/COL 18 2.9 611 97.1 629 100.0

Interest in LE/Work Ethic 24 3.8 605 96.2 629 100.0

Hiring Process 37 5.9 592 94.1 629 100.0

Diversity recruitment challenges

When asked about challenges in diversity recruitment, the respondents indicated that quantity was the 

foremost problem. 

While candidate quality was still noted as a challenge, simply finding the minority applicants with an 

interest in law enforcement seemed to be the greatest challenge. Furthermore, given the limited number of 

minority applicants, competition was also listed as a common challenge: “Just getting minority applicants to 

apply. Every agency is trying to lure minority applicants, so we are competing against each other.”

In some cases, attaining a diverse department was a matter of geography and settlement patterns with 

respondents indicating that the lack of diversity in their communities made it difficult to recruit diverse 

applicants. Depending on the perspective of the respondent, for some this was a challenge; for others it 

made diversity a nonissue: “There is not a lot of diversity in our community, so we don’t need many minority 

candidates to reflect the community balance.”
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|22

A notable percentage of the respondents indicated no diversity recruitment challenges. Some viewed 

diversity as a nonissue, focusing solely on candidate qualifications: 

“We do not view diversity as being an issue. We do have a very diverse community.... We look more 

at obtaining applicants based on their qualifications and ability to perform the job.” 

Other respondents echoed the challenge of finding qualified candidates, regardless of their community’s 

diversity:

` “The challenge is finding qualified recruits, not their diversity.” 

` “Diversity has not been a huge issue, it’s finding ANYONE who can pass a background and write well.”

` “I wish that I had the problem of trying to choose the best candidate from among many and looking for 

diversity. The reality is that it is tough enough to come up with any qualified candidates.”

Others noted that diversity was not an issue because they were fortunate to have a diverse applicant pool:

` “We really haven’t had that much of a problem in diversity recruitment efforts as our organization has a 

long time history of hiring and promoting people from diverse groups.”

` “We have a diverse group of employees and our organizational culture celebrates our differences. We 

have no difficulties in this area.”

Innovative overall recruitment methods

The most common recruitment tools were attending job fairs and reaching out to colleges and universities. 

Most targeted criminal justice students while others made a point to reach out to students in nontraditional 

fields of study. 

Nearly 20 percent of respondents indicated that they had altered their requirements, streamlined their 

hiring process, or increased or emphasized salaries or other nonmonetary incentives to bolster their 

recruiting.

Beyond the methods easily quantifiable, respondents reported using some of the following methods:

` Appealing to the technologically savvy applicant

— Using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to promote the department

— Posting recruitment videos on YouTube 

— Texting applicants to apprise them of hiring process or remind them of test dates.

` Advertising in creative places

— Advertising in movie theaters

— Partnering with local electronics stores and requesting them to show the agency’s recruitment video 

on their display televisions.
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

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POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

` Taking a more service-oriented approach to the hiring process

— Being more accessible and open 

— Using of e-mail and text messaging to communicate 

— Returning phone calls immediately 

— Having officers make personal calls to applicants to encourage them to complete the process.

` Touting themselves as either a “training agency” or as a place for older or family-oriented officers to “slow 

down” or “downsize” from larger departments

` Poaching officers who work for other agencies that pay less, who are looking to retire, or who have had 

problems and need a second chance

Figure 8: “Describe the most significant challenges your agency has had in its diversity recruitment efforts.”

CASES

INCLUDED EXCLUDED TOTAL

N % N % N %

None or Blank 131 20.8 498 79.2 629 100.0

Misc 16 2.5 613 97.5 629 100.0

Applicant Quality 96 15.3 533 84.7 629 100.0

Applicant Number 189 30.0 440 70.0 629 100.0

Salary/Benefits 27 4.3 602 95.7 629 100.0

Competition 66 10.5 563 89.5 629 100.0

General Problems 85 13.5 544 86.5 629 100.0

Education Requirement 12 1.9 617 98.1 629 100.0

Community Is Rural or not Diverse 61 9.7 568 90.3 629 100.0

Community Is Diverse but Applicants Are Not 20 3.2 609 96.8 629 100.0

Limited Budget/Resources 5 0.8 624 99.2 629 100.0

Housing/COL 3 0.5 626 99.5 629 100.0

Outreach/Changing View of LE 41 6.5 588 93.5 629 100.0

Hiring Process 13 2.1 616 97.9 629 100.0
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

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Figure 9: “Describe any innovative and successful programs, strategies, or methods that your agency has 

used to improve its overall recruitment effort.”

CASES

INCLUDED EXCLUDED TOTAL

N % N % N %

None or Blank 158 25.1 471 74.9 629 100.0

Misc 33 5.2 596 94.8 629 100.0

Web-Based 85 13.5 544 86.5 629 100.0

Job fairs & Colleges 106 16.9 523 83.1 629 100.0

Target Military 14 2.2 615 97.8 629 100.0

Pull from P/T or Reserve Officers 14 2.2 615 97.8 629 100.0

Changed Hiring Process or Requirements 59 9.4 570 90.6 629 100.0

Target Laterals 23 3.7 606 96.3 629 100.0

Target Academies / Non- Certifed 49 7.8 580 92.2 629 100.0

Targeted Youth Program 22 3.5 607 96.5 629 100.0

Variety of Advertising 55 8.7 574 91.3 629 100.0

Increased Pay / Incentives 61 9.7 568 90.3 629 100.0

Slogan/Branding 8 1.3 621 98.7 629 100.0

Involving Current Officers 55 8.7 574 91.3 629 100.0

Community Outreach/ Open House 16 2.5 613 97.5 629 100.0

Collaborate with Other Agencies 20 3.2 609 96.8 629 100.0

CD/DVD 13 2.1 616 97.9 629 100.0

Innovative Diversity Recruitment Methods

Most respondents indicated that they had no innovative or successful diversity recruitment programs to 

share (most were looking for some) or did nothing special beyond their general recruitment efforts. Beyond 

that, the most common strategy for reaching out to diverse populations was to involve minority community 

groups (such as local NAACP chapters, women’s advocacy groups, Black chambers of commerce), 

participate in special events (such as a Latino festival), and advertise in minority media outlets.
Police Recruitment: Foundation Concepts

 25|

POLICE RECRUITMENT:

FOUNDATION CONCEPTS

Beyond the methods easily quantifiable, respondents reported using some of the following methods:

` Advertising in gyms and spas for women candidates

` Promoting maternity uniforms and part-time and job-sharing positions for women

` Creating a web page devoted to women in policing that highlights women officers and their 

achievements

` Promoting incentive pay for bilingual officers

` Targeting military members who are viewed as more diverse

Figure 10: Describe any innovative and successful programs, strategies, or methods that your agency has 

used to improve its diversity recruitment effort.”

CASES

INCLUDED EXCLUDED TOTAL

N % N % N %

None or Blank 323 51.4 306 48.6 629 100.0

Misc 43 6.8 586 93.2 629 100.0

Same as General Recruiting 104 16.5 525 83.5 629 100.0

Target Community Groups 58 9.2 571 90.8 629 100.0

Target Minority Media 51 8.1 578 91.9 629 100.0

Minority Colleges 32 5.1 597 94.9 629 100.0

Minority Job Fairs or Professional Assoc. 17 2.7 612 97.3 629 100.0

Use Minority Recruiters 23 3.7 606 96.3 629 100.0

Target Youth 14 2.2 615 97.8 629 100.0

Illustrate Diversity in Ads 16 2.5 613 97.5 629 100.0

Multilingual Brochures 2 0.3 627 99.7 629 100.0

Figure 11:. “Has your agency developed any innovative recruitment materials or resources that you would 

be willing to share with other agencies?”

CASES

INCLUDED EXCLUDED TOTAL

N % N % N %

None 452 71.9 177 28.1 629 100.0

Yes 31 4.9 598 95.1 629 100.0
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Other Hard-to-Recruit Groups

Only 5 percent of respondents indicated other groups or subgroups beyond those identified in the survey’s 

fixed response questions who posed a recruitment challenge.

Of those, the following were listed as other demographic groups or subgroups posing recruitment 

challenges:

` Asian, Hispanic, and Black women

` Armenian

` Vietnamese

` Somalian

` Eastern Indian

` Ethnic Russians

` Brazilian (Portuguese-speaking)

` Middle Eastern

` Pakistani

` Cape Verdean

` African immigrants

` Guyanese

` Just qualified applicants in general with good 

morals and a real interest in law enforcement.

Nonsworn Recruitment Challenges

Twenty-five percent of respondents indicated that nonsworn positions pose a recruitment challenge, and of 

these positions, communications and dispatch were identified as the most challenging ones to fill. Generally, 

the difficulties were blamed on the demanding nature of the job and the poor quality of candidates.

Not many successful strategies for addressing these challenges were provided. A few noted that they try to 

use college interns or apply for grant funding for the professional positions.

Figure 12: “If you have experienced problems in the recruitment of a nonsworn position, indicate the type 

of position and the nature of the challenge.”

CASES

INCLUDED EXCLUDED TOTAL

N % N % N %

No or None 473 75.2 156 24.8 629 100.0

Yes 155 24.6 474 75.4 629 100.0

Communications/

Dispatch 95 15.1 534 84.9 629 100.0

Records/Clerk 18 2.9 611 97.1 629 100.0

IT/Professional Positions 19 3.0 610 97.0 629 100.0

Salary 20 3.2 609 96.8 629 100.0

Corrections/Jail Positions 7 1.1 622 98.9 629 100.0

Candidate Quality 18 2.9 611 97.1 629 100.0
RECRUITING 

FOR DIVERSITY

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RECRUITING FOR DIVERSITY

Recruiting for Diversity

Recruiting for Diversity

A law enforcement agency that reflects the community it serves is a goal widely shared by police executives, 

by the government officials who oversee these executives, by community stakeholders, and by the people the 

police serve. A 2007 report issued by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), A Symbol of 

Fairness and Neutrality: Policing Diverse Communities in the 21st Century, summarized the value of a diverse 

police force: 

“Having a department that reflects the community it serves helps to build community trust and 

confidence, offers operational advantages, improves understanding and responsiveness, and reduces 

perceptions of bias.”1

Police have made clear, steady progress toward the goal of diversity, but results have been mixed and some 

agencies have fallen short in the face of considerable challenges. Facing what some have called a national 

recruiting crisis, some chiefs and sheriffs find it difficult to attract a sufficient number of candidates, let alone 

candidates who are both representative of the community and highly qualified to meet the increasingly 

complex needs of 21st-century law enforcement.

On a national level, survey data compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics provide evidence of progress 

toward diversity. Looking at the most recently available survey data using a nationally representative sample, 

minority representation among police officers in local police departments rose to an estimated 24 percent 

in 2003, compared with 15 percent in 1987.2

 In sheriff ’s offices, minorities accounted for an estimated 19 

percent of sworn personnel in 2003, compared with 13 percent in 1987.3

 Increases in the percentage of 

women were also evident but more modest. Women accounted for 11 percent of local police officers in 2003, 

compared with 8 percent in 1987. In sheriff ’s offices, the percentage of women among sworn personnel 

remained relatively unchanged, accounting for 12.9 percent in 2003, compared with 12.6 percent in 1987.4

These national trends offer some encouragement, but progress on the local level has varied. The causes 

of the underrepresentation of minorities and women in law enforcement are complex and include both 

organizational and societal factors. Some agencies have not changed their recruitment practices in decades, 

in spite of considerable changes in social values, job markets, marketing strategies, and shifts in policing 

styles. In some communities, job seekers do not see law enforcement as an attractive or culturally acceptable 

career, and in some neighborhoods, residents see police as an occupying force rather than public servants 

who can engage with law-abiding community members to keep neighborhoods safer.

Law enforcement leaders who wish to improve their department’s recruitment of women and minorities 

may also face obstacles inside the department, such as perceptions among employees that diversity is a 

bureaucratic quota system or a form of reverse discrimination. A clear understanding of challenges and 

opportunities both inside and outside the department is critical for planning and executing a successful 

diversity recruitment strategy. 
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Objectives and Focus

The overarching objective of this report is to give law enforcement executives and managers a basic 

framework for addressing diversity issues and developing strategies to enhance diversity through 

recruitment and selection. This report is part of a recruitment toolkit developed by the IACP with 

funding from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office) of the U.S. 

Department of Justice. The toolkit represents the culmination of the three-phase Collaborative 

Leadership Project.5

The report focuses primarily on topics of recruitment and selection, the front end of the law enforcement 

career cycle. These are the areas where law enforcement executives and their personnel managers can make 

the most immediate impact on enhancing diversity. The focus on these front-end stages, however, should 

not detract attention from the fact that retention and career advancement issues are critical components of 

the career cycle and essential for success in long-term diversity strategies. Recruiting and selecting minorities 

and women is just the beginning. Success will be short-lived if departments cannot provide opportunities for 

professional growth and advancement through the ranks. Retaining and advancing the minority and women 

candidates whom a department selects today is the start of a cyclical process. It will create the role models 

and mentors who will make diversity recruitment in the future less challenging.

In the sections that follow, the report discusses the benefits of diversity in law enforcement agencies, 

recognizing that there are benefits for both the department and the community. The challenges to diversity 

recruitment—including those in the agency and in the community—are discussed in practical, real-world 

terms. The report also provides practical strategies and approaches to overcome challenges and change 

recruitment and retention practices in ways that will enhance diversity in local law enforcement agencies.

Diversity as a Changing Concept

In law enforcement, as in other public and private sectors, diversity recruitment has traditionally focused 

on increasing the number of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and women. But the meaning of 

diversity is changing along with demographics and social values. Diversity now means more than embracing 

variations in race, ethnicity, and gender; it also encompasses variations in age, language skills, culture, religion 

or belief system, and sexual orientation. 

Diversity is increasingly being used to stress the importance of individual differences rather than merely 

stressing group differences. A broader appreciation of diversity recognizes what individuals can contribute 

to the organization as individuals. This perspective acknowledges that an individual’s perspectives are 

shaped by his or her racial and cultural background but also recognizes the tremendous variation within 

administratively defined groups and the benefits of bringing together individuals who have a variety of 

perspectives. 
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Recruiting for Diversity

Spotlight on Demographic Changes

It is clear that demographic changes are affecting law enforcement agencies across the nation. The Hispanic population, through immigration and a higher birth rate, is 

growing faster than other groups in the United States. In addition, internal migration, 

often in response to changes in local job markets, has resulted in rapid changes in 

the composition of communities across America. Historically, urban areas and border 

communities served as gateways for immigrants. Today, police chiefs and sheriffs in 

all parts of the country, including suburban and rural areas, find themselves serving 

burgeoning immigrant populations. As a result, law enforcement leaders in most areas 

are attempting to come to terms with cultural and language challenges, as well as the 

conflicts that arise between new immigrants and the established population. Demands 

for officers with language skills and cultural competencies has grown in these agencies, 

but law enforcement executives have often found it difficult to attract candidates who 

reflect and can serve the newly emerging communities.

Iowa, Minnesota, and North Carolina are among the states experiencing rapid growth 

in Hispanic populations. In Chaska, Minnesota, a suburban community about 25 

miles southwest of Minneapolis, about 10 percent of the population is Hispanic. But 

according to Chief Scott Knight, none of Chaska’s 23 officers is Hispanic, even though 

the department has made recruitment of Hispanic officers a priority.6

Other immigrant groups also pose similar challenges for police chiefs and sheriffs. 

Hmong (an ethnic group from Southeast Asia) refugees have settled across Wisconsin 

and Minnesota, and Somalis are arriving in large numbers in places like Lewiston, 

Maine, a small mill town of with a population of 35,000, largely of FrenchCanadian heritage.

Given the intense competition for recruits among law enforcement agencies, local 

chiefs and sheriffs find it difficult to attract candidates of all backgrounds, including 

candidates from immigrant groups. Smaller cities with emerging minority and immigrant 

populations are at a competitive disadvantage because larger cities that are already 

ethnically diverse generally offer higher salaries and provide more opportunities for 

career advancement.
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Benefits of Diversity

As a publicly funded service profession, law enforcement is ethically bound to serve the entire community. 

A commitment to diversity in an agency that reflects the community it serves sends a message of inclusiveness 

and equality and is consistent with fundamental notions of democracy. Diversity in the workforce also helps 

to build the trust and legitimacy that are necessary for effective police-community cooperation across all 

sectors of the community. Through diversity, police are better able to relate to the community and perform 

public safety and crime-fighting missions. Police leaders have cited many benefits of a diversified workforce: 

` Helps police officers arrive at a broader array of solutions

` Helps to develop balanced, relevant, and culturally sensitive responses to community problems and 

critical incidents

` Enhances mutual understanding between the department and the community

` Reduces stereotyping of groups in the community by the police and stereotyping of the police by 

community groups

` Inspires members of formerly underrepresented groups to support the police.

In recent years, the emergence of the community policing model underscored the value of diversity. Mary 

Ann Viverette, a former chief of police and past president of the IACP, has argued that diversity is vital to 

law enforcement’s continued success: 

We have learned that to be effective, police cannot operate alone; they require the active support 

and assistance of their communities. Central to maintaining that support is the recognition that 

law enforcement agencies must reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. Every day, our 

officers come into contact with individuals from different cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic 

classes, religions, sexual orientations, and physical and mental abilities. Each of these groups brings 

a different perspective to police-community relations and, as a result, our officers must be prepared 

to respond to each group in the appropriate fashion. Failure to recognize and adjust to community 

diversity can foster confusion and resentment among citizens and quickly lead to a breakdown in the 

critical bond of trust between a law enforcement agency and its community.7

The bond Viverette describes is tenuous, and it is easier to break than to reestablish. Law enforcement 

leaders in jurisdictions grappling with rapidly changing demographics know the importance of earning and 

maintaining the trust of new arrivals who are among the most vulnerable members of any community, and 

members of other groups that are underrepresented on the police force and in other city agencies.

Obstacles to Recruitment of Women and Minorities 

Before law enforcement executives and personnel managers can meet their recruitment and selection 

objectives, they must first identify and understand the challenges they face in their jurisdiction. In general, 

policing has an image problem among some constituents.
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RECRUITING FOR DIVERSITY

Recruiting for Diversity

Law enforcement leaders have long speculated about the causes of generally low interest in police work 

among women and nonwhites. They suspect that women generally see law enforcement as a maledominated culture where women are not welcome and that women fear sexual harassment, fear being 

ostracized and stereotyped by colleagues and supervisors, believe that they’ll be steered away from higherprestige job assignments (such as SWAT and detective services), and believe that a law enforcement career is 

incompatible with raising a family because of work scheduling and related issues.

According to conventional wisdom among police leaders, nonwhites are likelier than whites to associate 

police with the civil rights abuses of years gone by and with present-day bias and unequal treatment, 

including racial and ethnic profiling. Some nonwhites may view policing as a white-dominated and racist 

profession and may reject the idea of working for the police because they fear being perceived by their peers 

as selling out. 

Other impediments may prevent some qualified minority-group members from pursuing careers as police 

officers. Some, for example, may view policing as a blue-collar occupation rather than a profession such as 

medicine, architecture, or the law that may garner more respect.

Recent immigrants may be suspicious of police in the United States because police in their countries of 

origin are corrupt or commonly use excessive force. Among newly arrived immigrant groups, including 

naturalized U.S. citizens and children born here, limited proficiency in spoken and written English may 

prevent some from applying for positions with the local police department.

Overcoming these obstacles, to the extent that they exist in a particular jurisdiction, requires a conceptual 

model that takes into account factors both inside the department and out in the community.

How to Increase the Diversity, Number, and Quality of Recruits

Increasing the diversity and quality of new officers takes vision and commitment on the part of the 

department’s leaders and employees and the help of the community they serve. 

Create Leadership Vision and Clear Organizational Commitment

Achieving and maintaining a diverse law enforcement agency requires strong leadership, commitment, 

and diligence. With a diminished candidate pool and increased demands on law enforcement caused 

by homeland security concerns, executives and managers may feel pressured to reduce or even abandon 

resource-intensive diversity recruitment and selection efforts. But diversity remains critical to effective and 

fair law enforcement. Consistent with general community outreach and partnership strategies, diversity in 

the ranks can help to ensure that the entire community is jointly and fully vested in the public safety venture. 

Persistence can pay off. Twenty years ago, the agency now known as the Miami-Dade Police Department set 

ambitious goals: increase the proportion of African-Americans from 8.5 percent of the force to 25 percent, 

Hispanic officers from 7.5 percent to 50 percent, and women officers from 7.5 percent to 25 percent. By 

2004, the department was 19.5 percent African American, 47.5 percent Hispanic, and 23.6 percent female.8
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

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More recently, a community outreach program helped the Ottawa Police Service in Ontario, Canada, 

achieve significant gains in diversity. Between December 2005 and September 2006, the agency hired 107 

police officers and seven civilians. Among them were 27 women and 47 speakers of languages other than 

English and French, including Serbo-Croatian, Mandarin, Arabic, and 14 other languages. The agency also 

reports that the force now features significant representation of visible minorities, Aboriginals, and declared 

members of the gay and lesbian community. 

Commitment to diversity must start at the top. A clear and unequivocal dedication to diversity goals 

on the part of the law enforcement executive and his or her executive management team is critical to 

establishing and maintaining a culture that is conducive to promoting diversity. An essential component of 

that commitment is an accountability structure that assesses progress and holds individuals responsible for 

meeting diversity goals. A commitment to diversity must be seen as a long-term strategic plan, rather than a 

quick fix. 

To underscore this message, an agency’s commitment to diversity should prominently and consistently 

appear throughout an agency’s written documentation, including its mission statements, policies, and 

recruiting material, as in the following examples:

We are aware of the diversity of our community, and we will attempt to have our department be 

reflective of those we serve. We believe in the dignity and worth of all people and are sensitive to those 

who may be apprehensive of the police. We are committed to protecting the rights of all with a focus 

on community-oriented policing in our delivery of services. In doing so, we recognize the public is our 

most important ally and we encourage them to join us in our crime prevention efforts. We can’t be 

totally effective without their help! (Monterey, California, Police Department)9

We appreciate our differences and recognize that unique skills, knowledge, and backgrounds bring 

strength to the community. We aspire to create a police department that reflects our community. 

We embrace and include our community by seeking their input and responding to their concerns. 

(Wichita, Kansas, Police Department)10

Such statements help reassure prospective applicants that the department places a high value on diversity. 

They also remind department employees of the department’s values.

Take Stock of the Department’s Diversity

The next step in enhancing diversity in a law enforcement agency is to determine which groups are 

underrepresented in the agency. Many agencies, particularly smaller agencies, may already be aware of 

their shortfalls. Larger departments may need to take stock of where they are, both quantitatively and 

qualitatively, to determine the gaps they need to fill. 
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Recruiting for Diversity

Conduct a Quantitative Assessment

Does the department reflect the diversity in the community? Answering this question can be more complex 

than it would initially appear. What is the community that an agency wants to reflect? Is it composed only 

of residents, or does it take into account daytime populations who may come to the jurisdiction for work, 

business, entertainment, or worship? 

A simple tally based on census data is a good place to start. Departments can use a data grid, such as the 

one shown in Figure 1, if other information sources, such as employee records, are not readily available. For 

convenience, the example here uses categories consistent with those of the U.S. Census Bureau.11 Racial 

and ethnic categories should be modified to meet local needs. For instance, if a jurisdiction contains distinct 

Chinese and Korean communities, the category of Asian would be more useful if it were broken down 

further into Chinese, Korean, and Other Asian.

Expanding on the example above, larger agencies with more complex organizational structures may want 

to perform similar tallies by individual units, divisions, ranks, or job descriptions. Doing so will provide the 

advantage of understanding the current composition across the command structure or in functional units 

(such as the detective bureau, the juvenile division, or the SWAT team). 

Gauge the Current Organizational Climate

The tabulation of an agency’s current composition outlined above is a relatively straightforward quantitative 

undertaking. But the numbers themselves tell only part of the story. The chief executive and supervisors 

should be prepared to assess the internal climate candidly with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender. Any 

divisiveness, stereotyping, or hostility in the department based on race, ethnicity, or gender has the potential 

to undermine recruitment and selection strategies. If these problems are left unchecked, they also will have a 

negative impact on retaining a diverse mix of employees.

A forthright self-assessment process can include such tools as informal discussions, structured focus groups, 

and internal surveys designed to ensure that respondents remain anonymous.

Figure 1: Departmental Quantitative Diversity Assessment.

RACIAL AND ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF __________ POLICE DEPARTMENT ON __/__/__

MALE FEMALE TOTAL

# % # % # %

White

Black or African-American

American Indian or Alaska Native

Asian

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander

Hispanic or Latino
Law Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit

|36

Tap into Internal Knowledge

A practical approach to gauging the internal climate with respect to diversity is to engage members of 

underrepresented groups in the agency. Assessing the experiences of current minority and female members 

of the department, including both their present feelings and their experiences with the recruitment and 

selection process, can provide valuable insights. These forms of engagement can be informal or formal, such 

as a candid discussion among trusted colleagues or in the context of supervisory meetings. It is critical that 

they take place in an atmosphere of trust and that confidentiality is assured. Participants may be reluctant 

to be candid if they fear repercussions or suspect that their comments will be widely disseminated. Larger, 

more structured attempts to assess employee experiences should be conducted by independent consultants 

who take appropriate steps to assure the confidentiality of respondents.

An employee focus group that the Sacramento Police Department conducted as part of its Hiring in the 

Spirit of Service (HSS) initiative was guided by the following questions:12

` What attracted you to a career in law enforcement in general and the Sacramento Police Department in 

particular? If you changed from an earlier career path or direction, what influenced this change? 

` Why did you continue your employment with the department? What makes you want to stay?

` What kinds of barriers (social, political, economic, personal, and so on), real or perceived, prevent 

women and minorities from applying for jobs in law enforcement?

` What are ways that the Sacramento Police Department can help candidates overcome these barriers?

` What types of marketing and recruiting information would appeal best to women and minorities? For 

example, what information would attract these candidates and how should it be presented?

` How and where can the department find qualified law enforcement applicants that represent the city’s 

diverse demographics?

` What other ideas do you have for improving the department’s recruitment of women and minorities?

` In what ways might you, as employees, be able to assist in those recruiting efforts?

Assess the Potential Recruiting Pool

With a clearer understanding of the department’s racial, ethnic, and gender composition, law enforcement 

managers must assess how they can best achieve their recruitment goals through community outreach. One 

practical first step is to assess the potential candidate pool and devise appropriate marketing strategies. This 

assessment includes a basic understanding of the community’s racial and ethnic composition to provide a 

quantitative picture of where agency is falling short of ideal representation. Figure 2 is a relatively simple example. 

Using statistical tabulation to understand where a department stands in relation to the community is 

useful for planning and for assessing gaps. Law enforcement managers and executives should not leave the 

impression that they are merely interested in obtaining a precise statistical match. The primary problem with 

stressing underrepresentation (or overrepresentation) is that it evokes fears of a quota system, with all its 

negative connotations. Diversity recruitment is more than balancing population groups; it is more broadly 

focused on enhancing relationships and bringing a variety of perspectives and experiences into the agency. 
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RECRUITING FOR DIVERSITY

Recruiting for Diversity

Figure 2: Example of Statistical Standing of Departmental Diversity.

RACIAL AND ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF ANY TOWN PD ON ___/___/___COMPARED WITH COMPOSITION OF ANY TOWN

Department Town

Male Female Total All Genders

# % # % # % %

White 130 61.9 16 40.0 146 58.4 40.0

Black or African-American 39 18.6 19 47.5 58 23.2 35.5

American Indian or Alaska Native 2 1.0 0 0.0 2 0.8 1.0

Asian 6 2.9 1 2.5 7 2.8 6.0

Hispanic or Latino 33 15.7 4 10.0 37 14.8 17.5

Total 210 100.0 40 100.0 250 100.0 100.0

% Female 16.00

There are other reasons to avoid setting precise numeric benchmarks. For one thing, census data about any 

particular jurisdiction are not as precise as one might hope. They often are somewhat out of date because the 

general census is conducted only once every 10 years.13 The census has other shortcomings as a measure of a 

jurisdiction’s diversity:

` The census is not a precise count but an estimate based on samples.

` The census undercounts certain populations, such as undocumented residents.

` The census reflects only the residential population and does not include daytime or seasonal populations. 

With respect to the last bullet point, the census may not reflect an agency’s real service population. 

Police departments may serve business districts or institutions that bring in daytime populations that 

are significantly different from and more diverse than the residential population. Jurisdictions may have 

a church or mosque, for instance, that draws many worshippers from outside the community for several 

hours several days a week. A jurisdiction near the shore or a ski resort could experience a seasonal surge in 

the size of the service population, just as a jurisdiction in an agricultural area can expect to see a sharp rise 

in the service population when migrant farm workers arrive each year. The demographics of the visitors 

could alter the demographics of the service population during the peak season. Because daytime, periodic, 

and seasonal visitors expect and receive police service while they are in a jurisdiction, the police agency that 

serves them would benefit from recruiting persons with cultural competencies to work more effectively 

with these visitors. 

Another reason to avoid precise benchmarks is that population data may suggest targets that are unrealistic 

or impractical to obtain. For instance, in most communities, women make up roughly half the population. 

Few departments can reasonably expect to achieve a workforce that is 50 percent female. In the United 

States, roughly 13 percent of police officers are women. 
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Last, any assessment of an agency’s realistic expectation of matching the demographics of the service 

population must be conducted within the context of applicable policies, rules, regulations, and laws. 

Residency rules, for example, could affect an agency’s ability to attract candidates, particularly if housing 

costs are high relative to law enforcement salaries. 

Engage the Community

Community involvement in defining the qualities desired in local law enforcement candidates has taken hold 

in a few jurisdictions. In addition, several agencies have elicited support by developing diversity committees 

that are composed of both department personnel and community members. Developing such committees 

can increase employees’ and community members’ sense of ownership of the selection process. Members of 

committees can act as advisors or play more active roles. A number of agencies have specifically sought and 

trained community leaders to act as recruiters on behalf of the agencies. The following are several examples 

of community involvement, all sharing a common commitment to broad-based representation. (For more 

examples of community involvement in police recruitment for diversity, see “Community Partnerships in 

Police Recruitment” on page 75.) 

Example 1: The community recruiter program in Sacramento, California, adopts the same

core principles and strategies that are part of community policing. It arose from the recognition

that community members, including community leaders, understood little about the

department and its selection and recruitment processes.When instituted in 2004, the program

represented a reinvention of the recruitment process, identifying interested community

leaders and training them to be what the department calls community recruiters. Community

recruiters undergo a 3-hour orientation about the department and the qualifications and

requirements for new recruits. They receive a handbook containing details about the written,

oral, and physical agility examinations; job requirements; background checks; and job

applications.The department produced a video that addresses each aspect of the testing process

and life in the academy.

As the program grew, recruiters became more involved in the process. Instead of just providing

names of possible candidates,community members became involved in the process of screening

acceptable candidates. Community recruiters now serve on entry-level and promotional oral

panels. This involvement has enhanced the process and provided a valuable opportunity for the

department to understand cultural differences, particularly as they relate to interviewing and

testing. Through involvement in the interview panels,community recruiters learn about the

department and become more effective recruiters and screeners.

Example 2: Members of the police diversity advisory committee in Vancouver, British

Columbia, Canada, are Vancouver residents who come from diverse cultures, races, sexual

orientations, neighborhoods, and occupations. They advise the police chief on a wide

spectrum of safety issues that concern diverse segments of the community, including ways to

promote police recruitment in the communities in which committee members live and work.

They advise on policies in the department,especially those that have an impact on diversity

recruitment. They also collaborate with the department’s Diversity Relations Unit and support

various community liaison officers in their recruiting efforts.
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Recruiting for Diversity

Example 3: In Indianapolis, Indiana, the police department has initiated what it calls the

Hometown Heroes campaign. This community-based initiative mobilizes community leaders,

religious ministers, and members of the media to seek out prospective new applicants for the

police departments. Central to this campaign is a virtual academy where potential applicants

can spend a day familiarizing themselves with the police department and its culture.

Participants attend a simulated police academy class complete with physical training,classroom

lecture, and incident scenarios. Potential police candidates can also participate in ride-alongs

with veteran officers. Those who are convinced the department is right for them are given

extensive tutoring (up to 16 written test sessions and eight physical training sessions) to help

them prepare for written and physical exams. The Indianapolis Police Department has doubled

its number of minority applicants since the initiation of this program.

What these police departments have in common is, among other things, a commitment to diversifying the 

police force and the support of the surrounding community. Diversity recruitment measures in agencies that 

lack one or both of those characteristics are destined to struggle. 

Officers as Recruiters

Police leaders have discovered that the most successful recruitment programs involve every member of 

the police department in the recruitment of new officers, and that the most important contribution police 

officers make to recruitment in general is the way they go about their work. Studies have shown that officers’ 

demeanor and professionalism during contact with someone powerfully shapes that person’s impressions 

of the police department and policing as a career. Officers can also help with specific recruitment goals by 

inviting promising candidates to apply for police work, by encouraging high school students to consider 

a career in policing, and by being prepared to answer questions about how one applies to become a police 

officer, the qualifications, and related information. 

Even if every member of the department is recruiting continuously, police departments typically assign an 

employee to oversee recruitment efforts. In smaller departments, the recruiter is likely to be an officer who 

spends part of his or her workweek on recruitment and the rest on normal duties. Larger departments 

typically operate recruitment units. 

Requirements for agency recruiters vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but good recruiters generally 

share certain important skills, abilities, and characteristics: They are good public speakers, time managers, 

planners, and writers. They are creative, maintain a professional appearance, and conduct themselves—

on and off duty—in a way that reflects positively on the department. Individuals with backgrounds in 

advertising, marketing, or sales have many of the traits associated with good recruiters. They are willing and 

available to work evenings and weekends and to travel out of town for recruitment events.

Both part-time and full-time recruiters require training in a number of areas: public speaking, marketing 

and sales, time management, and web site management. Recruiters need training in the hiring authority’s 

selection process and the rules and laws governing recruitment, selection, and employment. For purposes 

of diversity recruitment, they need to know the benefits of diversity, the department’s diversity goals, and its 

progress toward those goals.
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Continuously Evaluate Efforts, Educate, and Retrain

To succeed, any program requires monitoring and regular reevaluation. Diversity recruitment is no different. 

Leaders must be prepared to modify the program strategies as new aspects of the environment emerge. 

Participants can also come up with innovative ideas after implementation, all of which lead to a new cycle of 

planning and implementation.

Diagnose the Recruitment Market

Information about current and future prospective applicants can help an agency focus its limited recruitment 

resources on persons who are most likely to seek a career in policing and can serve as a foundation for 

designing and implementing recruitment strategies. The most cost-effective method for collecting these 

data is through a formal survey. With funding from the COPS Office, the IACP Collaborative Leadership 

Project has produced a model survey instrument for obtaining relevant characteristics and analyzing 

the current and future recruitment populations (see Appendix A of “Community Partnerships in Police 

Recruitment” on page 87).

After a local police agency tailors the survey to address its own needs, the survey can be used to help the 

agency develop a profile of people who are inclined to respond favorably to particular recruitment initiatives. 

People who fit this profile make up the target recruitment population.

Identifying the target recruitment population is not the only purpose of the survey. It also can determine 

how the target recruitment population views the police department. Do recruitment targets consider the 

local police department fair, trustworthy, and committed to workforce diversity? How do members of the 

community who have some influence on members of the target population view the department? Would 

they be willing to assist in a community-based recruitment effort?

Beyond administering the police career survey, the police department should also research its competition 

for those employees. What other local employers seek to hire from the target recruitment population? What 

enticements do these employers offer? What differentiates the police department from its competitors? This 

information will provide a clearer picture of the competition within the job market for the identified target 

population. The local police agencies’ demand for officers, comparative salaries, and benefits obviously are all 

core considerations for prospective hires.

Reach Out to Prospects where They Live, Work, Worship, and Play

Recruiters can get their information into the hands of potential recruits by engaging them on their 

terms and in their neighborhoods. Women- and minority-owned businesses, grocery stores, health clubs, 

neighborhood council meetings, YWCAs, schools, and universities—especially criminal justice programs, 

career fairs, and sporting events—are all excellent venues in which to engage potential recruits. 

Community involvement in police recruitment can help police recruiters find new ways and places to reach 

prospects. Religious leaders who support police efforts to recruit women and nonwhite police officers, 

for instance, can arrange for police officers to visit places of worship to talk to youth groups about law 

enforcement careers. Community activists can coordinate police presentations about the agency’s diversity 

goals at community centers in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. 
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RECRUITING FOR DIVERSITY

Recruiting for Diversity

Some agencies have seen their efforts to recruit women pay handsome dividends. According to Donna 

Milgram, executive director of the Women in Policing Institute, women officers were just 10 percent of the 

officers in the Albuquerque Police Department before the agency launched an aggressive campaign to increase 

that percentage. Recent statistics reveal that it is now 33 percent women. In Tucson, 10 percent of police 

officers were women before the police department set out to increase that percentage. It is now 29 percent.14

Their strategies, according to Milgram, included hosting career fairs devoted to women and policing and 

creating advertising materials that featured women. They took advantage of opportunities to get free media 

exposure by writing human-interest news stories on female officers for newspapers and magazines, including 

those aimed at minorities, just before testing periods. They produced public service announcements for 

television and radio that featured female officers, sent female officers to be guests on radio and television talk 

shows, and took advantage of free listings in event calendars in newspapers and on cable television and radio. 

Selection: How to Increase the Diversity and Quality of New 

Officer Classes

If recruitment efforts have succeeded, and a police department is attracting more women and minority 

applicants, its next challenge is to select the best officers from among those candidates. Selection typically 

involves four steps: 1. receiving applications, 2. examining selected applicants, 3. investigating selected applicants’ 

backgrounds, and 4. hiring selected applicants. What follows are recommendations departments can implement 

to expedite this process. This will also help departments avoid losing applicants because of a process that takes 

too long and help all qualified applicants, including women and minorities, succeed at each step in the process. 

Diagnose the Human Resources Function

In diagnosing the human resources system, police executives should first map each step of the local testing 

and selection procedures, and identify the strengths and weaknesses of jurisdictional and agency recruitment 

and selection policies and practices so that factors that contribute, or serve as barriers, to successful 

recruitment and selection can be highlighted. The IACP has produced database development guidelines 

including information about data-collection efforts that can help agencies focus on the legal framework 

for recruitment and selection, the authority and administration for recruitment and selection, as well as 

recruitment and selection policies. (see Appendix B of “Community Partnerships in Police Recruitment” on 

page 101). These topics should include pertinent state statutes, civil service requirements, workforce profiles, 

recruitment strategies, and selection sequences.

It is important to maintain statistical data on such factors as the number of applicants, those who appear for 

the initial step of the testing process, the number who survive each subsequent step in the selection process, 

those who become eligible for appointment, and the number selected. Race, gender, and other descriptors 

of local significance should be compiled so that the evaluation can lead to specific recommendations for 

improvement in the process.

The data can allow the chief executive to identify any agency processes that may hinder recruitment and 

selection of members of specific groups. To create this profile, information must be collected, isolating the 

race, ethnicity, and sex of applicants. In any effort to recruit and select minorities, such information will 

provide the chief executive with a barometer of the agency’s success in efforts to diversify the department.
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Personnel turnover and retention is the final profile required by the model. For this purpose, agencies 

should identify the sex, age, race, ethnicity, and years of service of every sworn and nonsworn member. 

The information should be grouped by rank, assignment, and position, and, where relevant, the cause of 

departure (resignation, termination, disability). This information will help police tailor the recruitment 

message to prospective applicants and should also help guide the agency in refining some of its personnel 

policies and practices.

Improve the Application Process

Agencies can make it easier to apply for the job. An agency that makes applications available on its web site, 

as well as through other means, can save applicants time and expense. Some police agencies are accepting 

online applications, an approach that others may wish to adopt to remain competitive.

Agencies can also encourage interested persons to apply by responding promptly to their questions. An 

e-mail inquiry that goes unanswered or telephone call that never gets returned can discourage a would-be 

applicant who could take the silence as a sign that the department is not interested in hiring him or her. 

One way to prevent leaving such an impression is to assign a recruiter to answer questions promptly.

Agencies can also help interested persons decide whether policing is right for them by making a selfassessment instrument available at the police department and on the agency’s web site. The instrument 

can describe the minimum qualifications for a position as an officer and encourage would-be applicants to 

consider their fitness for a job that requires enforcement of the law, taking charge in a crisis, and dealing with 

people who are hurt, in trouble, or dangerous. If prospects discover that policing does not sound right for 

them, they can screen themselves out of the process without ever submitting an application. But if they have 

the qualifications and the desire, they can screen themselves in and apply for the job.

Improve the Examination Process

The next step in the selection process is to test applicants who meet the minimum qualifications. Testing, like 

all selection procedures, must comply with the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, in title 

41 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, 

sex, religion, or national origin. Discrimination is defined as the use of a selection procedure that has an adverse 

impact on the hiring, promotion, or employment of someone because of race, color, sex, religion, or national 

origin. If challenged, law enforcement agencies must demonstrate the validity of a test or other selection 

procedures to meet these criteria. Federal guidelines provide a rule of thumb—the so-called four-fifths rule—

that police hiring authorities should remain aware of: “A selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which 

is less than four-fifths . . . of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by the Federal 

enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact.” If such disproportionality exists, the burden is on the 

agency to prove that the test or selection process is based on performance criteria that are valid and job-related.

Written examination—Departments can help promising candidates, including women and minorities, 

perform well on the examinations by supplying them with guidebooks and by making tutoring available. 

The Los Angeles Police Department gives applicants copies of its career development handbook, which 

contains study tips for test takers and other useful information.15 Training designed to reduce test anxiety 

can help candidates who are qualified but apprehensive about taking a test with so much at stake.
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RECRUITING FOR DIVERSITY

Recruiting for Diversity

Oral interview—In most selection processes, the oral interview follows the written exam. The composition 

of the oral interview board is an important consideration when crafting an effective selection system 

conducive to workforce diversity. The oral board is one of the most visible aspects of the selection 

process, and if the oral board is not well-conducted, candidates are likely to feel as though they did not 

get a fair chance. 

Providing cultural awareness training for review board panel members or, more important, including 

minority and community representatives, demonstrates the agency’s commitment to diversity to both the 

community and the recruit. Training for oral review board members should cover legal issues governing 

inconsistency, irrelevance, subjectivity, and job relevance to avoid inappropriate, discriminatory, or illegal 

lines of questioning. Agencies should check with their state POST program for available training for 

review boards.

Training is critical for both nonagency board members and officer participants. Untrained officers can 

sometimes ask inappropriate—and sometimes illegal—questions. Agencies should ensure that participants 

are well-trained and apply the same standards to evaluate all candidates. Participants should be briefed on 

interview etiquette and protocol and given a list of acceptable answers to the prepared questions. It is equally 

important to supply panel members with a list of questions not to ask, such as questions about health and 

medical history.

Physical agility tests—Physical agility tests are another selection component that can tend to have an 

undue adverse impact on candidates. For example, physical agility tests can inappropriately emphasize upper 

body strength and thereby eliminate otherwise qualified candidates. On average, this selection component 

tends to adversely affect female candidates. Physical fitness should not be overemphasized, but rather given 

an appropriate weight in the overall selection process. 

An important consideration for law enforcement agencies in reviewing entry-level fitness tests is whether 

officers who currently are performing the job can satisfactorily pass the test, as well. By establishing 

an agencywide standard of physical performance, police departments identify a necessary level of 

performance in keeping with the job-relatedness criteria of the Uniform Guidelines on Employment 

Selection. Agencies may consider administering physical competency tests as the final component in the 

selection process. Mentoring and training programs can also help to mitigate the potentially disparate 

effects of this selection component. 

Two large agencies have taken steps to help prevent the adverse effects that the physical agility test can 

have on women applicants. An Alaska State Troopers program provides free guest passes to a local gym 

for female applicants. The program allows applicants to use the gym to train for the physical agility test and 

to work out with troopers who review academy fitness requirements. The Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s 

Department eliminated physical agility testing altogether for entry-level applicants. Instead, students 

are given physical conditioning training during academy training and are required to pass an agility test 

before graduating from the academy. Like military training, this arrangement gives candidates the time and 

opportunity to achieve standards with the support and guidance of the organization.
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Retention and Advancement and Their Relationship to Recruitment

Managers can have a positive effect on enhancing and sustaining diversity in the organization by 

concentrating on four critical areas: recruitment, selection, retention, and promotion and advancement. In 

this document, the focus is on recruitment and selection, the two areas at the beginning of the process where 

a law enforcement leader can have the most meaningful impact. For successful long-term strategies, however, 

the reader is reminded that these four elements are interdependent. If an agency cannot retain minority and 

women candidates and ensure that they have the same opportunities to experience professional growth and 

fulfillment as other candidates, recruitment efforts will eventually suffer. 

1.	 International Association of Chiefs of Police, A Symbol of Fairness and Neutrality: Policing Diverse Communities in the 21st Century (2007, 10).

2.	 Hickman, Matthew J., and Brian A. Reaves, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Local Police Departments, 2003.

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2006. NCJ 210118., www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/lpd03.

pdf. The term“local”refers to municipal police departments,county police departments other than sheriff ’s offices, and tribal police agenci

3.	 Hickman, Matthew J., and Brian A. Reaves, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sheriffs’ Offices, 2003.Washington, D.C.:

U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2006. NCJ 211361. www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/so03.pdf.

4.	 Comparable state police data were available beginning in 1990. Among state police, minorities accounted for 10 percent of sworn police officers

in 1990 compared to 17 percent in 2003.Women accounted for 4 percent of state police officers in 1990 compared to nearly 7 percent in 2003.

5.	 Four initiatives undertaken by the IACP in the last decade underscore how diversity has been interwoven into the IACP’s mission. A 1996

resolution submitted by the IACP Civil Rights Committee and passed by IACP membership formalized the association’s commitment to

diversity. The IACP’s ad hoc panel on women in policing produced The Future of Women in Policing: Mandates for Action in 1998, a report

that addresses strategic policies and plans for marketing policing to women and also examines screening and selection processes, the role

of mentoring programs,evaluation and research initiatives, and other critical elements for strategies that promote policing as a profession

accessible and responsive to women. The IACP Collaborative Leadership Project, of which the present toolkit is one product, led to the

publication of Mobilizing the Community for Minority Recruitment and Selection, the creation of a community partnership model developed

and piloted in the police department in Hartford, Connecticut. Last, the IACP Diversity Coordinating Panel,established in November 2005,

works to ensure consistency across all IACP sections,committees, and divisions whose work relates to diversity. The panel is paving the w

for future work and has accepted the formidable charge of ensuring that the diversity is a core and consistent focus across relevant IACP

projects.

6.	 Associated Press,“Police Departments Face Challenges in Minority Recruitment,” November 7, 2005.

7.	 Viverette, Mary Ann,“President’s Message: Diversity on the Force,”The Police Chief 72, December 2005.

8.	 California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training,“POST Recruitment and Retention: Best Practices Update.” April 2006:

64–65.

9.	 Monterey Police Department,“Monterey Police Mission Statement,” April 7, 2005, www.monterey.org/mpd/general_info/mission.html.

10.	1 Wichita Police Department,“Mission Statement,” 2007, www.wichita.gov/CityOffices/Police/WPD+Mission+Statement.htm.

11.	The U.S. Census Bureau in 2000 began treating Hispanic (or Latino) as a cultural category rather than a race:“A person of Cuban, Mexican,

Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” Census 2000 used six race categories (White;

Black or African American; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander; and Some Other Race)

and allowed respondents to identify with more than one race.

12.	National Crime Prevention Council,“Lengthening the Stride: Employing Peace Officers from Newly Arrived Ethnic Groups.”Washington,

D.C.: November 1995.

13.	Historically, the U.S. Census is undertaken every 10 years. Beginning in 2005, the decennial census is being supplemented by the American

Community Survey (ACS). ACS will have annual sample size of about 3 million addresses. Individual areas will be sampled in 3-to-5-year

cycles. The sampling methodology is more robust than interpolations and estimates that the census bureau used before ACS. As the ACS is

rolled out, it will provide more timely and more reliable population estimates for local jurisdictions.

14.	Milgram, Donna,“Get the Facts: Recruiting Women Officers,” PoliceOne.com, September 19, 2007, www.policeone.com/writers/xolumnists/

DonnaMilgram/articles/97459.

15.	“Los Angeles Police Department Career Development Tutorial Handbook,”reprinted in Major Cities Chiefs, Human Resources Committee,

Achieving Diversity through Marketing, 1999–2001, 81–116.
AGENCY COLLABORATION 

IN POLICE OFFICER 

RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION

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AGENCY COLLABORATION IN POLICE 

OFFICER RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION

Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

Agency Collaboration in Police Officer 

Recruitment and Selection

In police agencies in the United States, resources dedicated to recruiting traditionally have been marginal. 

Few agencies apart from state police and larger municipal police departments have full-time recruiters. 

In many smaller agencies, recruitment is often the responsibility of one employee who has other duties 

and little or no budget for recruitment activities. Police departments and sheriff ’s offices typically conduct 

their recruitment in isolation from other agencies. Consequently, neighboring agencies are competing for 

individuals from the same hiring pool of potential candidates.

When two or more police agencies in the same region collaborate on police recruiting, they can streamline 

the recruiting process, improve the number and quality of applicants, and save time and money. Police 

agencies in some jurisdictions and regions have moved beyond treating peace officer recruiting as an activity 

to be approached in isolation. Such collaboration can be especially helpful to agencies that cannot afford a 

full-time recruiting staff. 

How to Collaborate with Neighboring Agencies to 

Improve Recruitment

Any police department or sheriff ’s office can take a number of practical steps to improve its recruiting 

posture. Suggestions from a 2001 report (and 2006 update) by the California POST Commission are 

an excellent starting point. In addition to the POST suggestions, lessons are available from a number of 

thriving regional collaborations.

Reach Out to Neighboring Agencies

 Someone has to begin the conversation, no matter what form an initial outreach attempt may take. Policing 

agencies in a given county or region likely face similar challenges in recruiting new peace officers. The 

forum for opening the discussion, among others, could be through a regional police chiefs’ association or an 

informal gathering sponsored by the county sheriff or police chief. 
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Start Small

Agencies can help one another in small ways. Consider starting one of the following initiatives:

` Cooperative regional job fairs

` Regional advertising of local policing employment opportunities 

` Joint sponsorship of a citizen police academy or junior police academy

` A multiagency ride-along program to introduce potential applicants to the agencies in the region

` Joint sponsorship of a detailed orientation to prepare potential applicants for the selection process

` Joint sponsorship of some form of a pre-academy to prepare potential applicants for the physical ability 

and agility test or the entry-level written examination 

` A regional mentorship program to make the application process in the region more user friendly.

Become More Sophisticated 

Once agencies in a region have collaborated on small initiatives and have had some success, agency leaders 

could soon be ready for more ambitious projects, such as the following: 

` Create a regional brand to market police agencies in the region

` Highlight the personal policing stories of officers and deputies as a way to tell the policing story to 

prospective applicants

` Create a detailed, easy-to-read summary of entry-level requirements

` Create a candidate self-assessment instrument to help potential applicants determine their fitness for 

police work

` Launch a regional police recruitment web site.

Establish a Regional Recruiting Organization

Agencies working together to establish a regional recruiting organization can vest the organization in a 

police academy, a sheriff ’s office, a county government agency, or some other regional structure. Its financial 

support can come from any of several sources:

` Interagency cooperation, applicant fees, and academy support

` A surcharge on moving traffic violations

` A combination of applicant fees and annual agency charges

` A percentage assessment on criminal fines

` County or state funding.
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AGENCY COLLABORATION IN POLICE

OFFICER RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION

Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

Regional recruiting organizations can handle more sophisticated recruitment projects than agencies can 

handle working alone:

` An enhanced Internet presence that would allow applicants to apply once for multiple agencies and 

schedule initial tests

` Pretests to prepare applicants for the entry-level written and physical ability tests

` A system to process applicants in a small-group environment

` A system to conduct the initial screening (including such components as the written test, physical agility 

test, orientation, and initial interview) using a compressed schedule

` A mentoring process that keeps applicants apprised of their progress through the system. 

Regional Collaboration in New Jersey: The Alternate 

Route Program

New Jersey is home to a police recruiting program that draws from a regional base: the Alternate Route 

Basic Course for Police Officers. Alternate Route offers individuals interested in becoming police officers 

the opportunity to attend a certified police-training academy, at their own expense, before they pursue a 

position in a police department or sheriff ’s office. Successful completion of the program does not guarantee a 

position in policing, but graduates are fully trained and able to pursue employment as certified police officers. 

According to the academy directors interviewed for this document, most graduates find police employment. 

The Alternate Route program began in 1993 in the Somerset County Police Academy, located at the 

Raritan Valley Community College in Somerville, New Jersey. Since that time, more than 200 individuals 

have graduated from that police academy and secured positions in New Jersey’s police departments and 

sheriff ’s offices. The academy estimates the savings to local government at about $35,000 for each graduate. 

The Somerset County Police Academy estimates the cost of the Alternate Route program at $4,100 

per candidate:

` Registration fee of $50 includes written and physical fitness tests

` Processing fee of $300 is due at the completion of training

` Medical, stress, and psychological examinations, $785

` Insurance (liability and health), $100

` Uniform and equipment $1,515

` Tuition, $1,350, due at the completion of training.

Need-based scholarships are available.
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The Somerset County Police Academy outlines the step-by-step application process for Alternate Route 

applicants:

` Attend an orientation meeting, preapply to the Alternate Route program, and pay a $50 registration fee 

within 5 business days

` Take the written test and obtain a passing score of 70 percent or better

` Take and pass the physical fitness examination

` Complete and submit a comprehensive application and, if selected to continue, undergo an oral interview

` Undergo a background investigation

` If selected to continue after the background investigation, undergo medical, stress, and drug tests

` If selected to continue, undergo a psychological examination.

Only applicants who complete these steps receive an appointment into the next academy class. Other 

Alternate Route programs in the state mirror the procedures in Somerset County.

In Morris County, for example, the police departments and the police academy have a symbiotic relationship. 

Recruiting efforts are centered on the academy, while police chiefs use the academy staff, records, and 

facilities to identify prospective candidates. When a police chief offers an Alternate Route candidate a letter 

of intent to hire, the candidate can no longer be considered by another police department, at least through 

the police academy. In turn, the academy uses local police departments to conduct background investigations 

of applicants.

In Camden County, the police academy has more independence from the police departments it serves. The 

police academy is not closely involved in local police agency recruitment efforts. Alternate Route applicants 

apply individually to police departments in a traditional way. Academy staff, as part of the Camden County 

Prosecutor’s Office, conduct their own background investigations, with assistance of the prosecutor’s central 

office staff. Local agencies are not involved with background investigations until they prepare to hire an 

Alternate Route candidate, at which time they are expected to augment the academy’s background check 

with their own review. 

A County Case Study: Alternate Route in Morris County

To be considered for the Alternate Route program in Morris County, applicants must meet the following 

minimum qualifications:

` At least 18 years of age and no older than 35 by the completion of the program 

` Sixty college credits or 2 years of active military service or a combination of the two 

` U.S. citizenship

` Resident of Morris, Sussex, Warren, Bergen, or Passaic counties

` No criminal convictions of any crime involving moral turpitude 

` Sufficiently healthy to participate in the physical training program.
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AGENCY COLLABORATION IN POLICE

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Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

Candidates must earn a passing score on the written test in January to go on to the physical agility test 

in February. After the two initial tests, 30 or 40 candidates proceed to interviews with a police chiefs’ 

panel in mid-March. The interview panel is made up of one or two police chiefs from Morris County, the 

academy director, and the director of the academy’s police training program. Candidates complete extensive 

application forms that are reviewed before the interview takes place. The panel works with a small number 

of standardized questions designed to draw out the personality of the candidate to determine whether he 

or she is compatible with the culture of a police department. The panel particularly focuses on community 

service values. Typically, 20 candidates emerge successfully from the interview process. During the last 

process, 21 applicants were successful. Fifteen were admitted to the next police recruit class and six were 

held for the following class 6 months later. Several weeks after the panel interview, successful applicants 

return for a day long written psychological test. A psychologist schedules later office visits. 

Successful candidates are fingerprinted by the sheriff ’s office, whose headquarters is immediately adjacent 

to the academy, and background investigations are assigned to police departments in the county. In addition 

to providing support on conducting backgrounds, local police departments also provide instructors for 

the academy. Typically, background investigations are completed within 2 months. In instances where 

an issue arises that does not clearly disqualify the person but nevertheless raises significant concerns, the 

candidate is called in for further discussion. Intentionally omitting information from the application package 

automatically disqualifies a candidate. The last benchmark for applicants is a medical examination held 

within 90 days of the academy’s start. 

Police applicants pay their own tuition and purchase uniforms, gun belts, and ammunition. The academy 

provides firearms and vehicles. Of the 39 police departments in Morris County, about half are eligible to 

hire from the Alternate Route program. One of those agencies is the Denville Township Police Department, 

led by Anthony P. Strungis III, who has been chief of police since 2004. Of the 34 sworn members of the 

department, 9 were hired using the old system, 13 were hired laterally from other agencies, and 12 are 

products of the Alternate Route system.

When a vacancy is anticipated or occurs unexpectedly, an announcement is published in local newspapers. 

Word also circulates informally among those seeking a police position, according to Chief Strungis. 

Interested persons are asked to file an application. The department hires either an Alternate Route graduate 

or an officer moving laterally from another agency. Chief Strungis states that the Alternate Route program is 

“a great time and expense saver for the town.” The township does not pay for a new officer’s academy tuition, 

equipment, or salary, nor does it take on the risk of injury or other disability suffered while the applicant is 

in training.

According to Chief Strungis, it is increasingly important for a Morris County police chief to keep track 

of what the academy is doing. The process of selecting Alternate Route prospects has become more 

competitive, particularly in view of the township’s requirement that new officers have either a bachelor’s 

degree or 60 college credits plus 2 years of military service. Typically, half of the Alternate Route candidates 

meet Denville’s education requirements, which are higher than those of the Alternate Route program and 

the state civil service. 
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The department’s most recent experience with hiring new police officers began in September 2006. Chief 

Strungis was aware of one pending resignation and anticipated the creation of a new position. (Chief 

Strungis has become sensitive to the timing of new officer hires from the police academy. On one earlier 

police academy search for a candidate, he was “beaten to the punch” by another police chief.) At that point in 

September, neither opening was certain; however, the police academy class had been under way for a number 

of weeks, and time was becoming a critical factor. To gain time, Chief Strungis and his three lieutenants 

visited the Morris County Fire Fighters and Police Training Academy to review potential candidates.

Eight of the 15 Alternate Route candidates met Denville’s educational requirements. The chief and 

his lieutenants independently reviewed each candidate’s application form, background investigation, 

psychological report, college record, driving and criminal record, and financial report. Each eligible candidate 

who wished to be interviewed by Denville was asked to write a 500-word essay describing why he or she 

wanted to be a police officer. After reading the essays, the four Denville officials agreed that five candidates 

should remain in consideration. During a later visit to the police academy, Chief Strungis and the three 

lieutenants interviewed five candidates under consideration. The interviews were structured around a set of 

standard questions. The four Denville police officials reached agreement on the top two candidates. Once 

this preliminary review was completed, the public safety director was informed that two candidates had 

been identified to fill the soon-to-be-vacant positions. The final step in the process was an evening interview 

with the public safety director and the mayor. 

Once Chief Strungis and the city administration came to an agreement on the new hires, the police 

department offered each candidate a letter of intent of employment through the police academy. The letter 

of intent is conditioned on the police candidate remaining in good standing and graduating from the police 

academy. Once the candidate accepts the conditional offer of employment, the police academy will not make 

further contacts between the candidate and other police agencies. 

The chief cannot envision taking the department back to hiring on its own again—a reflection of his positive 

assessment of the Alternate Route program.

A County Case Study: Alternate Route in Camden County

The county prosecutor is the chief law enforcement officer of each county in New Jersey. In Camden 

County, the county prosecutor supervises all functions and courses at the county police academy, which 

serves the 37 municipal police departments, as well as the Camden County Sheriff ’s Office, the Camden 

County Park Police Department, the Camden County prosecutor’s police staff, and police departments in 

the nearby counties of Atlantic, Burlington, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem. Twenty-six agencies in 

Camden County are potential employers of Alternate Route candidates. Of the normal academy class of 44 

students, 10 to 15 are Alternate Route candidates. 

The admission standards for Camden County’s program match those of Morris County. Applicants must 

complete a short application, pay a $50 fee to cover the entry-level test, provide a photo identification, 

and submit a thumbprint. After taking the entry-level written examination and a physical ability test, 

candidates are fingerprinted and asked to submit a urine sample. Next, candidates must complete an 

extensive application form that constitutes the basis for their background investigation conducted by the 

prosecutor’s office. Investigators check candidates through the National Criminal Information Center and 
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AGENCY COLLABORATION IN POLICE

OFFICER RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION

Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

the Interstate Identification Index, as well as municipal and family court records, firearms application history, 

driver’s license history, motor vehicle registration, and labor department records. Telephone confirmations 

of employment are conducted as well as checks with police departments that may have had contact with 

an applicant, and information on the candidate’s application forms is compared with the results of the 

background investigation. 

An interview by a panel of county police chiefs serves as the next stage of the process. Five police chiefs 

make up the panel, each scoring the candidate individually. The panel focuses on the candidate’s application 

submission in a series of questions that covers the candidate’s background, criminal history, and motor 

vehicle record. Individual scores from each police chief are combined into one score; candidates are then 

rank-ordered. The last stage in the process is a psychological examination. At times, hiring agencies 

supplement the psychological examination conducted by the academy with one of their own. Applicants are 

required to take a medical examination prior to entering the academy. During the most recent application 

process, 64 individuals took the entry-level examination to participate in the Alternate Route program of 

which 13 were admitted to the academy.

The 20-member police department in Berlin Borough, Camden County, rarely hires new officers, according 

to Chief Robert L. Carrara, but when it does so it prefers to hire officers who are already certified. The 

agency doesn’t have the time to select uncertified candidates and then wait for them to spend 23 weeks in 

the police academy. The last time the agency sponsored a new police officer through the academy was 2002.

The department recently filled a vacant position by first advertising in local newspapers for candidates who 

were police officers certified by the New Jersey Police Training Commission (PTC). It received about 100 

applications, most of whom came from New Jersey, some from Pennsylvania, and one from Arizona. Many 

applicants were PTC-certified, some were certified officers from out of state, others were Alternate Route 

candidates (about 10 Camden County Alternate Route candidates applied), and several had no previous 

police training. Neighboring Berlin Township Police Department had a vacancy at roughly the same time 

and had a similar pool of applicants.

The department’s patrol sergeants formed a screening committee, sifted through the applications, and 

conducted the first round of interviews. Chief Carrara said that the patrol sergeants are in the best position 

to ascertain which applicants will best fit with the department’s culture. The committee selected five 

applicants for an interview with Chief Carrara and the lieutenant. The chief and the lieutenant rank-ordered 

the five candidates and arranged for them to sit for interviews with the borough’s public safety committee, 

which is composed of the mayor and two members of the city council. The Berlin Borough selected a 

candidate to fill the vacant position. She is an Alternate Route graduate from the most recent police academy 

and the borough’s first female police officer. She was appointed at a Berlin Borough Council meeting on 

February 1, 2007.

Wishing in no way to minimize the character or motivation of candidates who are sponsored through the 

police academy by police departments, Chief Carrara nevertheless said that Alternate Route candidates 

demonstrate through their personal sacrifice a strong desire to be police officers. By paying their own way 

through the academy without a job lined up at any police department, Alternate Route candidates make 

clear their commitment to become police officers.
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The Camden County Police Academy Alternate Route candidates agreed with Chief Carrara: that 

competition is stiff for police officer positions. Because of this, candidates have to be willing to seek police 

employment outside their county of residence. The author of this report interviewed a number of Alternate 

Route candidates. What follows is a summary of several of those interviews.

Interview 1: He is 38 and has wanted to be a police officer since he was a child in Philadelphia, where 

he saw many victims of crime and wished he could do something to intervene. He joined the U.S. Marine 

Corps in 1989, fought in Desert Storm in 1991, and participated in the Iraq invasion in 2003. His entry 

into the police academy was delayed when his reserve unit was activated in 2006 and he served a third tour 

in Iraq. He lives in Burlington County, just north of Camden County, but is willing to accept a police job in 

any of the nearby counties. He is able to support himself through the Alternate Route program with savings 

from his overseas tours and support of his wife.

Interview 2: He is 24 and single. When he was a teenager, he saved a 2-year-old’s life and decided he 

wanted a career that would allow him to help people in danger. He came to the conclusion that he wanted 

to enter policing after September 11, 2001. He has an older brother who is a police officer with the Atlantic 

County Prosecutor’s Office. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and lives in Atlantic County, 

which borders Camden County. He would prefer to work in Atlantic County. He said the Alternate Route 

program makes him more marketable and allows him to decide which agency he wishes to join. He said he 

worked long hours—up to 20 hours a day—as a summer police officer, an emergency medical technician, 

and an environmental-remediation worker to save enough money to pay his way through the academy. 

During one stretch in the summer of 2006, he worked 107 consecutive days without a day off.

Interview 3: He is 24 and lives in a small town in Camden County. He said it is important for him to 

stay in the county and will look for police employment in surrounding cities because his own town does not 

expect to hire a new police officer for several years. The towns around his hometown hire Alternate Route 

candidates and do not sponsor police candidates through the academy, but finding a job is competitive. He 

graduated in May 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in law and justice. He wanted to be a teacher and became 

a substitute teacher at his own high school after graduation from college. He decided to become a police 

officer so he could be a role model for young people. He lives with his parents and has few expenses, limited 

primarily to health and car insurance.

The Alternate Route program does not appear to have changed recruiting in Camden County significantly. 

It has opened a door to new applicants that some agencies apparently are only recently accessing. This may 

be in large part because that region of New Jersey is still a buyers’ market; police jobs are limited and police 

chiefs do not have to go to extraordinary lengths to hire quality individuals. 

The same cannot be said about Morris County. Based on Chief Strungis’s experience, police chiefs in Morris 

County must take care to ensure they have access to quality police candidates, and they work closely with 

the county police academy to accomplish that objective. Chief Strungis cannot imagine returning to a time 

when his agency did its own recruiting. Based on the flood of applications his agency received for their 

last vacancy, Chief Carrara does not face the same predicament. Both agencies hired an Alternate Route 

candidate to fill a recent vacancy, in spite of different circumstances.
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Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

Regional Collaboration in Florida

Forty accredited police academies serve Florida’s roughly 300 police departments, 67 sheriff ’s offices, 

and state law enforcement agencies. Five of the academies are operated for state law enforcement, four 

are dedicated to specific county or municipal agencies, and the reminder have a regional focus housed in 

community colleges, junior colleges, or vocational or technical institutions. Ten regional selection centers 

operate in the state, all associated with a police academy. All of Florida’s academies start with the basic 

requirements for police officer selection set by the state of Florida. That is, each applicant must meet the 

following criteria:

` At least 19 years of age

` A citizen of the United States

` A high school graduate or its equivalent

` No felony convictions or misdemeanors involving perjury or false statement

` No dishonorable discharge from any of the armed forces of the United States

` Good moral character.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, through the Criminal Justice Standards and Training 

Commission, provides oversight for police training and certification. The commission sets minimum 

standards for employment and training for police and corrections officers, maintains training programs 

and curricula requirements, certifies training schools and instructors, certifies officers who meet basic 

requirements, carries out administrative sanctions and maintains records, and develops and administers the 

state officer certification examination.

Florida’s approach to the structured regional recruiting of police officers had its genesis in Pinellas County, 

on the state’s Gulf Coast. The Pinellas Police Standards Council operates the Police Applicant Screening 

Service (PASS) for the county’s police departments and sheriff ’s office. The Pinellas Police Standards 

Council oversees a recruiting agency and at the same time serves as the county police chiefs’ association. 

Brevard County, east of Pinellas County, on the state’s Atlantic Coast, uses a similar countywide recruitment 

system, but the Brevard Police Testing Center has a single recruiting focus.

Pinellas County and Brevard County conduct their recruiting activities differently and use different testing 

instruments. Pinellas County tests every Tuesday; Brevard County tests twice a month. Pinellas County 

has an extended initial application period; Brevard County compresses its initial application into a 4-day 

weekend. Pinellas County administers a multiple-choice writing ability test and obtains a writing sample; 

Brevard County gives a reading test and a candidate self-report—an online interview that inquires about the 

candidate’s background. Both administer the state-mandated Florida Criminal Justice Basic Abilities Test. 

Brevard County administers both physical abilities tests and medical examinations. Pinellas County does 

not administer either examination, but is considering the implementation of physical ability tests. Pinellas 

County has an education-and-experience requirement. While Brevard County maintains the basic Florida 

requirement of a high school diploma or its equivalent, it is considering adding a way to identify applicants 

whose personalities are not sufficiently resilient to withstand police work. In spite of these differences, the 

two counties are remarkably similar in the way they recruit police officers and sheriff ’s deputies.
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Pinellas County’s PASS

Police corruption in a smaller municipal police agency in Pinellas County in the early 1970s convinced 

officials that law enforcement throughout the county needed substantial improvement. County leaders 

concluded that improving the character of persons hired to be police officers could improve the quality of 

police departments. In response to lobbying by local officials, the Florida legislature authorized the creation 

of the Pinellas Police Standards Council. The council is required to conduct research, coordinate policy 

between agencies, and make recommendations to the legislative delegation for improving the quality of law 

enforcement in Pinellas County. 

The council drafted standards that define good moral character for applicants for all police positions in the 

county and, with the blessing of the legislature, established a central county authority to screen applicants. 

Today, that authority, PASS, operates under the direction of the sheriff ’s office and 13 municipal 

police departments in Pinellas County. Its purpose is to provide candidate evaluations and background 

investigations on behalf of those employers. After successful completion of the screening process, applicants 

enter an eligible candidate pool for one year, during which they may be called for job interviews by any of the 

PASS agencies. PASS is not an employer and participation does not guarantee employment to applicants. 

Individual agency employers may conduct additional screening steps (such as medical examinations 

or additional background reviews) to establish eligibility under their own employment requirements. 

Successful completion of the PASS process is also a requirement for entry into the police academy at St. 

Petersburg College.

All law enforcement agencies maintaining a headquarters in Pinellas County are eligible to participate in 

the Pinellas Police Standards Council. The council actively attempts to attract applicants to the county 

and has been successful in boosting the number of police applicants. Upon request from a Pinellas County 

municipality, the council will conduct an executive police search, an oral board, or a résumé review for the 

requesting municipality.

The minimum requirements established by the council for police officers in the county exceed the standards 

set by the state. 

Where Florida requires that an applicant be a high school graduate or its equivalent, PASS requires that he 

or she must also have at least one of the following qualifying educational or life experiences:

` An associate’s degree

` At least 60 semester hours of college credits (and have been in good standing, with a cumulative GPA of 

at least 2.0 on a 4-point scale)

` An honorable discharge from active duty in one of the armed services, after completing a regular 

enlistment without early separation

` Certification as a Florida law enforcement or corrections officer and completion of a 1-year probation 

(not counting the academy)
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Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

` Certification as a law enforcement officer in another state, the military, or federal law enforcement, 

after completing 1 year of service (not including academy training) and meeting requirements of an 

equivalency-of-training review

` Thirty college credits and graduation from the police academy.

In addition to the educational or life-experience requirements, PASS has an extensive list of disqualifiers.

Today, most candidates pay their way through the academy, without a guarantee of employment. The few 

exceptions to this are candidates who are highly sought after because they possess special skills. In some 

cases, a police agency will pay a candidate’s tuition and costs but not his or her salary.

Most graduates find police jobs with the sheriff ’s office or municipal agencies in the county. An information 

packet outlines the screening procedures for applicants to the PASS candidate pool:

Registration: Applicants must register in person with picture identification, pay a $50 fee, complete a brief 

questionnaire to determine their eligibility, and acknowledge that they have reviewed the information package.

Fingerprints: The sheriff ’s office fingerprints applicants.

Written test: Applicants must take a three-part test comprising multiple-choice questions that do not 

require previous law enforcement knowledge or experience, a multiple-choice writing test focused on 

identifying grammar and spelling errors in writing samples, and compose a brief essay on an assigned topic.

Personal history form: An extensive questionnaire, which must be signed and notarized, becomes the basis 

for a background investigation. Applicants are notified that potential employers will see the form and they 

should demonstrate the ability to produce a complete, accurate, and legible written work.

Administrative interview: Candidates must present the completed personal history form and all 

appropriate documents, such as a birth certificate, and social security card during the interview.

Background investigation: During background investigations, PASS relies on correspondence, an 

employment report from the Social Security Administration, credit reports, telephone interviews, and 

public records available on the Internet. PASS will visit employers if the applicant has a criminal justice 

background and the employer is relatively local.

(Florida now requires that employers respond to criminal justice employment screening inquiries and 

provides employer immunity.)

Polygraph or other examination: Investigators may administer a polygraph or other examination as 

requested by a participating agency.

Entry into candidate pool: Once candidates are accepted into the candidate pool, participating agencies 

may require them to undergo interviews, medical examinations, or other screening procedures.
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PASS at one time administered several of the screening steps routinely administered for police applicants 

but has since returned responsibility for these to employing agencies. Even before the Americans with 

Disabilities Act of 1990, PASS stopped conducting medical examinations and PASS does not conduct 

physical ability tests. 

PASS takes steps to accommodate special needs; for example, PASS will guide out-of-state applicants who 

call in advance through the written test, the fingerprinting process, and the administrative review in 2 days. 

In the event a candidate’s background investigation is not completed before the start of the academy, but the 

investigation appears positive, PASS may provide a provisional letter authorizing the applicant to enter the 

police academy.

The $50 applicant fee is important. It not only helps cover the screening costs but also represents a 

commitment by the candidate. If a candidate cannot pay the fee, it is waived.

While standards must be explicit, they must not be excessively rigid. Careful evaluation of each applicant’s 

entire background is important. Some applicants may not fail any specific standard but are clearly unsuited 

to be police officers. Other applicants may need reviewers to weigh one blemish in their background against 

their entire record, which otherwise may be strong.

The St. Pete Beach Police Department, led by Chief David Romine, recently added a grant-funded position 

that brings the agency to 31 positions. The new vacancy prompted Chief Romine to advertise an open 

position in the local newspaper and post an opening on the Florida Police Chiefs Association web site. More 

than 40 persons applied, many from out of state. Approximately half of the applicants were already in the 

Pinellas County PASS pool. Those who were not in the pool were referred to PASS for initial screening and 

processing. PASS created a background folder for each applicant and forwarded them to Chief Romine. 

The chief and his department selected 14 candidates for further consideration. They were interviewed 

by a panel of the department’s first-line supervisors. The sergeants sat as a trained interview panel using 

previously structured questions for each candidate. After each interview, the sergeants discussed the 

candidate’s interview but each sergeant rated the candidates separately. The scores were combined and 

Chief Romine interviewed the top four candidates. The St. Pete Beach Police Department performs the 

background investigation on the person selected to fill the position. Chief Romine notes that this process 

saves his agency significant time, effort, and money.

Agency sponsorship is on each police candidate’s mind. One-third to one-half of a typical Pinellas County 

candidate class is sponsored. Some agencies that hire candidates will later reimburse the cost of tuition. 

Here is an example of a recent candidate:

An applicant who happened to walk into Pinellas County’s Police Applicant Screening Service reported 

that he is 22 years old and lives in Clearwater. He will soon graduate from the University of South Florida, 

in nearby Tampa, with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. His father retired from the sheriff ’s office as a 

sergeant. His mother is a lieutenant with the Clearwater Police Department. He has spent two and a half 

years as a volunteer for the Clearwater Police Department and is currently doing an internship with the 

sheriff ’s office. He is scheduled to interview soon for a sponsorship program that would pay his academy 

tuition and expenses and make him a salaried employee during the academy.
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Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

Current police candidates from Pinellas County were also interviewed. The following are summaries of 

several interviews.

Interview 1: He is 34, almost 35. He joined the Army in 1991 and was honorably discharged in 1995. 

After working for Xerox Corporation for a number of years, he decided that he wanted to pursue a career 

in policing. He spent 3 years preparing: getting in shape physically and paying down a student loan. During 

that 3-year period, he worked as a handyman from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. for a salary equal to what he was 

earning at Xerox, and he worked out later in the afternoon. His wife works and he has taken out a $15,000 

loan. Originally from Illinois, he has lived in Florida since he was 14. He knows the area and is interested 

in remaining in the area. He wants to join the sheriff ’s office, which does not sponsor police candidates. He 

was pleased with the PASS process and believes he was hirable by a police agency before committing to this 

course of action, based on the screening process.

Interview 2: He is 24 and wants to join the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which 

has its own police service. Originally from North Carolina, he planned to be a police officer since age 3. He 

has lived on his own since age 19, loves Florida, and wants to remain in the state. As he was growing up, he 

engaged in commercial fishing with his grandfather off the North Carolina coast. He observed that people 

on the water do what they want and could not care less about the rules.

Interview 3: A single mother of a 12-year-old, she is 31. She is a nursing school graduate but was not 

ready to be a nurse. Instead, she spent 5 years as an air conditioner technician. She also earned an associate’s 

degree in crime scene technology. Her father is a former Marine and works in corrections in Massachusetts. 

She likes the team aspect of policing. Before applying for a local police position, she secured a corrections 

position in her father’s former place of employment, but her son did not want to move to Massachusetts. 

She has lived in Pinellas County since she was very young and is interesting in staying in the county. The St. 

Petersburg Police Department asked her on the first day of academy if she were interested in joining that 

department. To attend the academy, she and her son moved back in with her parents.

Brevard County’s Police Testing Center

The Brevard County Police Testing Center is modeled after Pinellas County’s Police Applicant Screening 

Service. The Brevard testing center started in 1987 with a staff of two. As is the case with PASS, the 

Testing Center is funded by a traffic-ticket surcharge. Two other Florida selection centers use traffic-ticket 

surcharges to fund their operations, the Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville and the Gulf Coast 

Community College in Panama City. The testing center has eight employees, including three investigators. 

The testing center’s executive director is James Reynolds, a retired deputy chief of police.

The testing center recruits, screens, tests, and conducts background investigations for 12 municipal police 

agencies and the sheriff ’s office. It is the primary point of contact for applicants wishing to attend the law 

enforcement academy, receive equivalency-of-training evaluation, or apply to be added to the countywide 

employment pool. Any Brevard County municipal police agency or the Brevard County Sheriff ’s Office may 

direct applicants to the testing center for screening and background investigations. Participating agencies 

may require additional interviews and assessments in addition to those required for the testing center. 
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The Brevard Community College operates two police academies, a 6-month day academy and an 8-month 

night academy. Both operate Monday through Thursday. The testing center conducts its testing and 

assessment process for police officers twice a month, except holidays. Applicants can download a one-page 

application for the testing and assessment process and are asked to identify a preferred and an alternate 

testing date. The application is to be accompanied by a $40 fee that may be waived if the applicant cannot 

pay but has made arrangements in advance. The testing and assessment is administered in the following 

sequence during a 4-day weekend:

FRIDAY MORNING: Reading test, candidate self-report (CSR), and Criminal Justice Basic Abilities Test.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON: Orientation to standards, and CSR interview.

SATURDAY MORNING: Physical abilities test.

MONDAY MORNING: Oral interview assessment. 

MONDAY AFTERNOON: Orientation to background investigation.

Investigators then conduct background investigations, which include a series of records checks, Internet inquiries, 

and personal interviews conducted by telephone or in person. During this period candidates schedule themselves 

for medical and psychological examinations the results of which go directly to hiring agencies. Polygraph 

examinations are also conducted. If no disqualifying or questionable facts are revealed, the applicant is notified 

of provisional acceptance to the law enforcement academy and given instructions for registering with Brevard 

Community College. The process must be completed 30 days before the law enforcement academy begins.

Typically, three-fourths of academy class graduates have jobs at graduation. In one recent class, 21 of 23 

candidates had jobs at graduation. The testing center makes it clear that it is solely a background and 

screening process and not a job placement service, but officials at the testing center feel that they can help 

steer candidates to the appropriate agency. The testing center staff know the agencies, their needs, and their 

expectations, and they get to know the candidates during the screening, where investigators average roughly 

8 hours with each candidate during several interviews. Their familiarity with the candidates allows them to 

steer candidates toward agencies that suit them.

As is the case with Pinellas County’s PASS, the Brevard County Police Testing Center is taking on a more 

significant role in attracting applicants. Brevard County’s employment situation makes this important 

because the county is home to major employers that provide strong competition for candidates. To attract 

interest, the testing center has acquired a laptop-based firearms simulator that it takes to community 

centers for presentations. It uses the simulator as the basis for discussion about the use of force in order to 

interest young people in key aspects of policing. The testing center has also developed promotional material 

specifically focused on women and African-American and Hispanic youths. 

The testing center has also launched a television advertising campaign by producing a 30-minute infomercial 

for leased-access cable. At $80 per broadcast, the 30-minute infomercial is cheaper to run than a 1-minute 

television advertisement, so the center is using 30-second spots on television to advertise its 30-minute 

infomercial. The 30-second television spots run on networks designed to reach viewers in specific 

demographics, including Spanish-language television, BET, ESPN, and Lifetime. The spot also encourages 

viewers to record the infomercial to watch it at a convenient time.
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Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

Indian Harbour Beach, in Brevard County, employs 19 sworn officers, 7 full-time nonsworn employees, 

and 3 crossing guards. According to Chief Robert Sullivan, recruiting new police officers is challenging for 

his department. It offers a starting salary among the top three or four in the county ($35,300 at the time 

of the interview), but the department does not have a take-home car program which is a benefit offered by 

other agencies.

When a potential vacancy comes to his attention, Chief Sullivan contacts the testing center, where he and 

his lieutenant can review files of persons who may be interested in employment with the department. He 

and the lieutenant interview candidates who might meet the agency’s needs and the town’s civil service board 

make the final selection. The board is composed of one police officer elected by the police department’s 

officers, and four citizens appointed by the town council. Among the current board appointees selected 

by the town council, two have previous police backgrounds, one has a security background, and one is a 

World War II veteran. The board conducts an oral interview, and board members score each candidate 

independently. The board then reaches consensus about which individual to hire. When only one candidate 

is available to fill a position, the board can waive the interview process.

Three police recruits who recently graduated from the Brevard Community College Law Enforcement 

Academy were at the testing center and the community college preparing for Florida’s officer certification 

examination. As a group, the Florida peace officer candidates and recruits were making significant sacrifices 

to attend the police academy. All had a connection to the region in which they wished to live and work, and 

none indicated an interest in moving outside the county to pursue a policing career. 

` She had been an emergency medical technician in the Brevard County Fire Rescue Department 

for 7 years. Twenty-eight years old, she had almost completed an associate’s degree. One of her uncles 

was a police chief and a county sheriff ’s deputy in Georgia. She spent a year and a half planning and 

saving to attend the academy, which involved working for other EMTs so she could bank shift trades. 

She continued working full time while attending the day academy. She used all her banked shift trades 

and vacation time, but planned for a period of leave without pay (LWOP). At the end of October, 

just as she was about to go into LWOP status, she was hired by Palm Bay Police Department. She 

and five others were being hired by Palm Bay as that city expanded its sworn staff authorization by 

nine. She knew the agency from her work with fire rescue and was very pleased to be a member of 

the department.

` He was 23 and wanted to join the military and go to Iraq when he graduated from high school 

in 2002. Instead, at his parents’ insistence, he enrolled in Brevard Community College. He did not 

do well on academic placement tests and was going to have to take noncredit classes in preparation 

for a state examination. He felt he was going nowhere fast. He then enrolled as a night student at 

Florida Metropolitan University in Melbourne and took classes in criminal justice, mathematics, 

communications, literature and history, graduating with an associate’s degree in criminal justice in April 

2006. In preparation for the police academy, he quit all of his several jobs and moved in with his parents. 

He tested for Palm Bay and interviewed for the sheriff ’s office but received no offer. He met a lieutenant 

from the Cocoa Police Department through the police academy, and went on several ride-along shifts. 

He applied for a position, was interviewed, and received a conditional offer from the Cocoa Police 

Department several days later. 
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` Age 33, she spent 4 years in ordnance while stationed in with the United States Navy in California 

from 1993 to 1999. She met her boyfriend in the Navy and has been with him for 11 years. They have 

two children together. She is originally from Melbourne and they moved back to the area when they 

were discharged from the Navy. They have lived in Brevard County for 8 years and own a home. She 

enjoyed the excitement of working in the Navy and expects to find the same in policing. She hoped to 

investigate sex crimes and work with ordnance. She attended the day academy and worked 40 hours a 

week as a security officer, all on the weekends (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, two double shifts and a 

single shift). She did well in the academy. She applied to Palm Bay after a month in the academy and 

started with them just after graduation. Her boyfriend started in the next academy class and did not 

have to work while in school. 

Recommendations from the California POST Commission

California’s Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training published Peace Officer Recruitment 

and Retention: Best Practices in 2001. It reports the results of a yearlong study of best practices and new 

directions for peace officer recruitment. The commission updated its work in April 2006 with Recruitment 

and Retention: Best Practices Update. 

As part of the IACP Recruitment Toolkit, the present document summarizes four sections of the 2001 

report (the fifth section relates to officer retention) and 10 recruitment strategies from the 2006 update. 

Many of these suggestions are not new to policing, but few have been widely adopted by law enforcement 

agencies. Several offer interesting new perspectives on recruiting new officers and many are specifically 

applicable to a collaborative regional recruiting effort. 

Specifically, the 2001 California POST report makes the following recommendations:

Develop a Recruiting Team

` Consider contracting with a marketing specialist or firm, or forming a consortium with other agencies in 

the area to share resources

` Support education for employees by partnering with colleges and universities, which could result in 

additional respect from the public and potential applicants

` Refer applicants who would better fit with another agency to that agency

` Collaborate with other agencies to help make the hiring processes more accommodating and userfriendly to attract qualified applicants and to keep possible applicants from moving to other career fields 

with less daunting processes.

Find Out What Potential Applicants Want

` Reach out to the young people in the community and inspire them to consider a career in policing

` Develop a profile of the successful officer, characterized by desirable performance standards, to help 

attract applicants who are the perfect fit for the jurisdiction and reduce the risk of a mismatch

` Streamline the testing and hiring process with faster testing and turnaround time to reduce losses to 

other policing agencies 
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Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment and Selection

` Survey applicants during the testing process to determine how they learned of the test, how they perceive 

the agency, why they are applying, and what their interests, values, and goals are

` Consider offering recruitment incentives to current employees, such as finder’s fees, additional vacation 

days, gifts, awards, medals, and so on.

Market the Agency and Use Technology

` Identify groups in the community whose members are not adequately reflected in the agency’s workforce, 

educate recruiters about the best resources for attracting the identified audience, involve members of the 

groups being sought in the recruitment effort, involve community groups and publications that promote 

diversity, and make recruitment flyers and posters attractive to all groups

` Create internships and cooperative programs between agencies and colleges

` Work with a graphic designer to tailor promotional materials to the target audience

` Create a junior police academy 

` Create a citizen academy, an excellent way to advertise the merits of the department

` Establish youth and adult programs, both paid and volunteer, to promote good relations with the 

community and expand the future applicant pool

` Highlight challenging aspects of policing and advance individual stories that illustrate compassion by 

police officers or sheriff deputies

` Personalize the testing process and improve communication with applicants 

` Use a web site to provide information to potential applicants and automate steps in the recruiting process

` Consider creating and participating in a regional database of potential applicants.

Consider Alternative Staffing and Employee Preparation

` Prepare young people for the rigors they will face in a policing career by giving them the opportunity to 

participate in police-related training, such as that offered in cadet programs

` Consider a reserve officer program, but only if the agency determines it is worth the cost of the effort

` Sponsor testing orientation programs that help potential applicants fully understand the testing process, 

familiarize them with the requirements and risks associated with policing, and develop organizational 

understanding and loyalty

` Strongly consider agency participation in a pre-academy, which can reduce academy attrition rates 

significantly, increase retention through the probationary period, and permit early detection and 

correction of problem attitudes or behavior

` Offer post-academy orientation to new officers to help them learn the department culture, develop new 

relationships, master the operating procedures of the jurisdiction, and increase esprit de corps

` Consider a mentoring program for new officers because such a program tends to establish careerlong relationships and agency loyalty, demonstrates that the agency is willing to invest in new recruits 

personally, and develops the skills of employees chosen to be mentors.
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The California POST’s April 2006 update offered the following 10 strategies to improve police recruitment:

1. Develop a Recruitment Plan

Take time to identify agency recruitment goals and plans for up to 5 years. How important is 

recruitment? How many people will need to be hired? What diversity needs exist?

How many recruiters will be needed to reach these goals? In short, develop a strategic plan relative to 

recruitment that involves the entire agency, if appropriate.

2. Conduct Research

Conduct research to better understand the agency, the community, and the results of current and 

past recruitment efforts. For example, research should provide an agency with the information to 

answer the following questions: Who is the ideal candidate? Are the job qualifications really what the 

agency wants? What advertising and other efforts are yielding the best results? What are the agency’s 

demographics and how do those compare with the community served? What has attracted and kept 

existing staff? Why do officers leave the agency? The answers to these questions will affect recruitment 

planning, advertising, and strategies.

3. Personalize the Recruitment Process

A significant number of comments were made about the need to personalize the recruitment process 

and to court candidates. Suggestions included making staff accessible to candidates to answer 

questions, regularly sending notices to candidates keeping them abreast of progress, reaching out to 

the families of candidates to address their concerns, and assigning agency staff to mentor selected 

candidates through the process.

4. Select and Train the Right People as Recruiters

Training recruiters is important, so identify the qualifications of a recruiter. Considerations should include 

matching specific qualities (such as race and ethnicity) of recruitment targets, willingness to talk with 

people and ease of doing so, salesmanship, assertiveness at job fairs, and a desire to recruit for the agency. 

Examples of topics include sales techniques, how to make cold calls, how to follow up with people 

through the process, understanding the respective jurisdiction’s selection process, and having answers to 

frequently asked questions.

5. Build Strong Partnerships

Develop relationships with others who can help provide a potential pipeline of candidates. Consider 

partnerships with military officials, college and high school counselors, community-based organizations, 

student associations, and other departments internal to the agency’s jurisdiction. If a good candidate does 

not qualify or fit in with the agency, refer him or her to a partner who may be able to employ the person.

6. Develop an Employee Referral Program

Employees may be the agency’s best source for referring good candidates. Help employees see 

themselves as ambassadors of the agency and develop a culture that fosters commitment to the agency. 

Keep employees informed about recruitment processes and the need for good candidates. Provide them 

with materials that they can give to potential candidates. Consider ways to acknowledge and reward 

employees who refer candidates, especially when those candidates are hired.
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7. Improve the Selection Process

Find ways to speed the recruitment and testing process. Make sure the right screening tools are in 

place to help identify the best candidates. Consider using a qualifying questionnaire that will allow an 

opportunity for people to screen themselves out if they have disqualifiers in their background. Train 

evaluators to know what to look for in candidates. The selection process should include a way of seeing 

how a good candidate might fit in the agency, even if not immediately in the position for which they 

have applied. For example, a survey of academy recruits found that women, more than men, were 

employed by a law enforcement agency in some other capacity before being hired as an officer.

8. Develop an Advertising Plan

Advertising is about attracting good candidates. To do this, one needs to know what good candidates 

are looking for in a job or career and where the advertiser can reach those candidates. This will take 

some research. Consider asking targeted groups to look at the agency’s message to ensure that it will 

be received the way it is intended. Scan the community to see where recruitment opportunities may 

exist because of other employers’ layoffs and be sensitive to cyclical factors, such as the school year. In 

the spring, for instance, college seniors are busy looking for career opportunities. Another consideration 

is the medium used to advertise. A multifaceted approach usually works best. Develop a way to track 

which approach yields the best candidates.

9. Develop an Internet Presence

Consider developing a recruitment web site for the agency. Many find that candidates are increasingly 

doing research about job opportunities on the Internet and many are applying online wherever online 

applications are available. Effective web sites are easy to navigate with a limited number of clicks and 

they give visitors an opportunity to ask questions and submit an application. The web site should list 

appropriate but limited information on qualifications and the testing process.

10. Use Effective Recruitment Strategies 

` Allow candidates to participate in a ride-along 

` Establish an ongoing college campus presence by sponsoring events (with refreshments) on college 

campuses (such as pizza at a club meeting) that allow recruiters to develop relationships with 

students over time

` Hire temporary employees in other capacities as a way to bring potential candidates into the agency 

` Promote the use of high school and college interns 

` Promote scholarships from professional law enforcement associations

` Rehabilitate good candidates who fall out of the process along the way

` Have an ongoing application process to keep applications coming in

` Ask employees to tell their story (on camera or in writing) about what attracted and keeps them 

working for the agency, and put those stories on the agency web site.
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The 2001 and 2006 summaries offer a multitude of approaches to improve police recruiting. Four themes 

for agencies emerge from these summaries: create partnerships, market the agency, enhance community 

outreach, and become more user-friendly. 

Create Partnerships

Share resources with nearby agencies to maximize the impact of those assets. Accomplish through 

partnerships the improvements that the agency could not achieve in isolation. 

Sponsor a testing orientation program, for example, to help potential applicants fully understand the testing 

process, create a junior police academy or a pre-academy, streamline the testing process with more frequent 

test administrations and faster turnaround times for results, and create a fully interactive web site.

Market the Agency

Create a meaningful brand. Highlight the challenging aspects of policing and advance individual stories 

from the agency.

 Develop a profile of a successful officer characterized by desirable performance standards, to help attract 

those who are a good fit. Identify successful applicants and understand their interests, values, and goals. 

Identify community expectations of the agency. 

Enhance Community Outreach

Identify groups in the community who are not represented in the agency and involve them in recruiting. 

Create high school and college internships and cooperative programs. Seek out youth in the community; it 

may inspire young persons to consider policing as a career. Recognize the community as the agency’s most 

valuable recruiting resource. 

Become More User-Friendly

Personalize the testing process and maximize communication with applicants. Create a prequalifying 

questionnaire that will allow potential applicants to screen in or screen out. Assign staff to mentor applicants 

through the selection process. Encourage potential applicants to participate in a ride-along.

How to Prepare Recruits to Succeed in the Police Academy

Oakland officials, eager to get more police officers and firefighters on the street, entered into an agreement 

with Merritt College, located in Oakland, to prepare potential public safety applicants for the city’s rigorous 

police and fire academies. 

Nationally, pre-academies are not extensively used by policing agencies, but they have interesting potential. 

For the Oakland Police Department, the pre-academy helps prepare potential applicants to apply to the 

police or fire service. The pre-academy offered by Merritt College is separate from the police academy 

operated by the Oakland Police Department. 
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Just 5 percent of applicants to the Oakland Police Department were passing the background check and 

psychological and medical examinations, and the city hoped the program would give those interested in 

becoming police officers a leg up on their way to the academy. The 6-week course offers college credits 

applicable to an administration of justice major, as well as a certificate in public safety career preparation 

from the college. Police academy preparation courses include introduction to the administration of justice, 

concepts of criminal law, community relations, report writing, public speaking, and physical education. 

In Las Vegas, the 2-week pre-academy operated by the Metropolitan Police Department prepares already 

successful applicants for the rigors of the department’s 22-week academy. Police candidates undergo a 

strenuous application process prior to the pre-academy, including written and physical tests, medical and 

psychological examinations, and a background investigation, which includes a polygraph test. The preacademy is a softer version of the academy, according to a police official. It is designed to prepare recruits for 

the classes they will take, inform them of the physical expectations involved in the training, and give them an 

immediate sense of how they will be treated during the academy.

Another variation on the pre-academy is a fitness class designed to improve recruits’ physical conditioning and 

introduce them to paramilitary training before they enter the academy. The Rio Hondo College Police Academy, 

a POST-certified police academy in Los Angeles County, offers such a class two evenings a week for 12 weeks. 

These programs can enhance the relationship between the recruiting agency and potential police officers. 

This is in addition to preparing potential applicants to be successful applicants (the California models) or 

preparing applicants to be successful recruit candidates (the Las Vegas model). The opportunity to establish 

mentoring relationships should not be ignored by agencies using these approaches to recruiting.

Hiring in the Spirit of Service

Agencies that advertise a police career as excitement and adventure should anticipate new officers who seek 

excitement and adventure. Many police agencies operating in the traditional mode advertise what some feel 

to be the glamorous, exciting aspects to police work. Much of this is paramilitary: SWAT teams, bomb 

squads, high-risk building entries, high-speed chases, and shootouts with bank robbers.

Such marketing reflects just one part of police work, and a small part at that. Service to the community 

and keeping the peace are the mainstays of most local policing, both in big cities and smaller communities. 

Problems can arise when new police officers confront the reality of the policing routine. Some may have been 

attracted by adventure and crave the excitement they were promised in recruiting advertisements. If excitement 

is missing, individual police officers might be tempted to create a situation that requires them to answer the call 

for adventure, creating problems for themselves, their agencies, and the communities they serve.

Starting in fiscal year 2000, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Service (the COPS Office) of 

the U.S. Department of Justice funded an initiative titled Hiring in the Spirit of Service (HSS) to explore 

methods and practices for hiring police candidates who were motivated by the spirit of service, persons 

who could develop dynamic partnerships in the communities they policed, and work collaboratively with 

those communities to solve problems. Three municipal police departments (Burlington, Vermont; Detroit, 

Michigan; and Sacramento, California) and two sheriff ’s offices (Hillsborough County, Florida, including 

Tampa, and King County, Washington, including Seattle) were the test sites. 
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They were directed to identify a critical balance of knowledge, skills, and abilities as well as the traits, 

characteristics, and background experience of public candidates that would help to ensure a blend of 

community service, keeping the peace, effective law enforcement, and officer safety. 

The traditional method of hiring new police officers and sheriff ’s deputies involves screening out those 

who exhibit an imperfection (whether cognitive, behavioral, or psychological) that suggests a candidate is 

inappropriate or unqualified. This is done during a multiple-hurdle process in which failure to overcome 

any one hurdle disqualifies the candidate from further consideration. This approach to hiring new officers is 

largely unchanged today in most policing agencies. Recognizing that many candidates are unsuited for police 

work, the HSS program was interested in finding ways to isolate good characteristics of candidates that may 

qualify them for service-oriented policing performance.

The five participating agencies were given great latitude to operate independently, although the five 

jurisdictions did meet as a group with staff from the COPS Office and the Community Policing 

Consortium on two occasions during the life of the project. The agencies were encouraged to elicit 

community feedback through focus groups and community participation in the screening process for new 

police officers. They were also encouraged to use marketing techniques, as though selling a product, and to 

develop a slogan that would describe their agency and the way it served the community. Media accounts 

often focus on incidents of brutality, abuse, corruption, and ineptness. This would be an opportunity for 

the five departments to tell their own story, an opportunity to use methods typically unavailable to policing 

agencies to overcome negative media.

Each test site developed a marketing strategy, a slogan, and recruiting initiatives. The agencies asked 

community members to help identify service-oriented characteristics and seek out applicants who fit a 

service-oriented profile, in essence making them adjunct recruiters. In two of the cities, these efforts involved 

partnerships with community development efforts, an unlikely arrangement in recruiting new police officers.

Most agencies involved their community directly in the selection process for new police officers and sheriff ’s 

deputies. Typically, this involved creating a set of standardized questions that followed a script, as well as 

developing a scoring key to ensure the reliability of independent ratings. Several of the sites developed oral 

interview guides to be used by both the community and the agency representatives.

In addition to efforts to improve the oral interview process, several sites undertook improvements in 

psychological and occupational testing to better select service-oriented candidates. Although this portion 

of HSS was approached with significant enthusiasm, it proved more difficult than initially anticipated. A 

more realistic approach, for purposes of this grant, involved reviewing commercially available instruments to 

determine their capacity to predict service-oriented performance.
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Each of the five HSS demonstration sites launched a set of initiatives:

Burlington Police Department

` Partnership with the city’s economic development office and an outreach coach 

` Community Consultant program in which community members serve as police recruiters

` Mentoring policy and English-language tutoring for noncitizen candidates

` Online entry-level practice test.

Detroit Police Department

` Expansion of the recruiting ambassadors program

` Communications strategy culminating in a media summit 

` Involvement of the community in CompStat.

Sacramento Police Department

` Occupational screening linked to partnership with the California POST Commission

` Recruitment-selection guides

` Innovation in performance appraisals for serving officers

` A community recruiter program.

Hillsborough County Sheriff ’s Office 

` Involve the community in the job analysis research 

` Leverage other grants to expand the HSS mission.

King County Sheriff ’s Office

` Identification of core competencies with links to existing assessment tools

` Development of a model eligibility list

` Development of a service-oriented appraisal system. 
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A Public-Private Partnership and an Applicant-Friendly 

Web Site

The King County Sheriff ’s Office in Washington uses a private partner for screening and testing new 

sheriff ’s deputy candidates. The company provides similar services to other agencies for the screening and 

testing of police officers, firefighters, and corrections officers. More than 80 police departments and sheriff ’s 

offices in Washington state have contracted for its services.

The link between recruiting peace officers and a public-private partnership (in this case with a private testing 

service) might not be evident immediately, but the connection is potentially very important. A government 

entity or collaborative arrangement involving government agencies, could take the place of the private testing 

service at the state, regional, or county level. In such an arrangement, a potential applicant could perform a 

variety of key preliminary activities online, the way in which applicants can today in King County:

` Identify the agencies in the state, region, or county that are of interest to the potential applicant

` See the basic state requirements and the prerequisites specific to each agency

` Examine an overview of the written testing process and physical abilities test

` Review an extensive self-assessment

` View the administrative steps involved in the application process 

` Sign up for the written test and physical agility test, based on available dates, times, and locations

` Complete an basic application and pay a registration fee.

All is available around the clock on any computer connected to the Internet. This availability considerably 

enhances an important theme in recruiting: it makes the agency much more user-friendly.

At the King County web site, the first step in the application process is selecting an agency. Selecting the 

King County Sheriff ’s Office, the visitor next sees the basic requirements for a King County sheriff ’s deputy, 

broken into four groups:

` Requirements at the time of application (U.S. citizen and high school graduate) 

` Requirements at the time of the test (vision correction standards)

` Requirements at the time of hire (age 21 and a Washington state driver’s license) 

` The automatic disqualifying background issues (driving violations, drug use, criminal activity, and 

dishonesty during the application process).

The visitor is then asked to indicate that “I qualify” or “I don’t qualify.”

The next screen introduces the visitor to the testing process, summarizes the basic elements of the written 

screening instrument used by the private partner, outlines the testing process, and describes the physical 

ability test mandated by the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission. The next screen 

instructs the visitor to choose a test location, date, and time. Two test dates are typically available during 

most months.
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The next screen is a lengthy self-assessment for the visitor to complete. It begins with basic qualifiers for 

police officers and sheriff ’s deputies (U.S. citizen, no adult felony convictions, and so on) and then moves to 

a sample of working conditions:

— I AM WILLING and able to perform routine, repetitive work and risk 

personal safety.

— I AM WILLING and able to enforce all laws regardless of personal feelings.

— I AM WILLING and able to risk exposure to contagious diseases and 

blood-borne and airborne pathogens.

— I AM WILLING and able to handle stress of both boredom and danger and 

work under the critical eye of the public.

— I AM WILLING to carry a firearm and I am willing and able to take the life 

of another person if justified by laws and department policies.

— I AM WILLING and able to deal with unruly or abusive individuals.

— I AM WILLING and able to work any assignment required, including but 

not limited to overtime, weekends, holidays, nights, standby and on call

— I AM WILLING and able to handle multiple functions at the same time 

(multitask) and memorize and recall detail.

— I FULLY UNDERSTAND that physical capabilities are important for 

successful performance as a public safety officer and I am able to perform 

those physical tasks.

— I AM WILLING and able to conform to policies, procedures, and discipline 

within a chain of command system.

— I AM WILLING and able to work under difficult conditions such as inclement 

weather, noise, crowds, and odors.

— I AM WILLING and able to accept constructive criticism.

— I AM WILLING and able to submit to a polygraph examination, psychological 

examination, medical examination, and drug screening.
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Also included is a list of administrative notices and liability releases. The visitor is then asked, “Meet the 

criteria? Congratulations!” and directed to the next step, the application, by clicking the “I qualify” button. 

The visitor is then asked to download a two-page liability waiver. The form must be signed and notarized. 

The visitor is presented with a short-form application and a bill that can be paid by credit card over the 

Internet or by a mailed check.

The testing system advertises open positions for police officers and sheriff ’s deputies; markets those job 

opportunities at colleges and universities, military bases, minority newspapers, and job fairs; processes 

paperwork for applications; administers entry-level written and physical ability tests; and provides the names 

of successful candidates to police departments and sheriff ’s offices who have contracted for these services. 

Equally important, the system provides for applicant self-selection. The testing system provides agencyspecific, entry-level requirements and asks applicants to screen themselves in only if they feel they qualify. 

The initial steps in the application process can be completed anyplace that has Internet access. The cost of 

these initial application services are shared by applicants and contracting agencies. Applicants are charged 

according to the number of agencies to which they wish to apply; agencies are charged an annual fee.

The potential for this addition to the recruitment process is obvious. It takes the front end of any peace 

officer application process to the next level, while informing the potential applicant of the requirements and 

standards that will be applied to her or his application. 
COMMUNITY 

PARTNERSHIPS

IN POLICE RECRUITMENT

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COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS 

IN POLICE RECRUITMENT

Community Partnerships in Police Recruitment

Community Partnerships in Police Recruitment

When the Ottawa (Canada) Police Service discovered a few years ago that its pool of applicants was 

shrinking and that its recruit classes lacked the diversity of Ottawa’s population, it asked its community 

for help in meeting its recruitment goals. Beginning in 2004, the agency identified community members 

who could spot potential police applicants and guide them through the rigorous application process. The 

community recruiters, called community recruitment champions in Ottawa, have helped the police service 

recruit more nonwhite officers, more women officers, and more officers who speak languages other than 

English and French. The program won the 2007 IACP/Motorola Webber Seavey Award for Quality in 

Law Enforcement and the 2007 IACP Civil Rights Award.

The Ottawa example serves as a reminder to police executives in agencies of all sizes that collaborating 

with the community can help with police officer recruitment in several capacities. Community members 

can participate in recruitment and marketing initiatives, in identifying ideal community police officer 

traits, and in interviewing candidates, among other activities. This document does not attempt to provide a 

turnkey solution to the recruitment challenges police agencies face because each police department has its 

own management strategy and its unique pattern of working with members of its community. Instead, this 

document describes various ways agencies can establish and sustain partnerships with the community to 

meet their recruitment and selection goals.

Why Community Inclusion?

Recruitment and selection of personnel are key components of an effective police department because 

quality personnel are one of the most critical elements in determining success. Surveys suggest that citizens’ 

satisfaction with police officers during direct contact with them—reporting a crime, receiving a traffic 

citation, or meeting to discuss a neighborhood problem—is the key element in determining their overall 

satisfaction with the police. Leveraging the resources that exist in the community to identify and select the 

right people to hire can help sustain the public’s satisfaction with its law enforcement agencies.

According to the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office) Community Collaboration 

Toolkit, engaging the community in the recruitment and selection processes offers at least six general benefits:

1. More can be accomplished together than either group could accomplish alone.

2. Working together will prevent duplication of individual or group efforts.

3. Collaboration will enhance the power of advocacy and resource development.

4. Joint efforts create more public visibility for the recruitment process.

5. Community involvement will provide a more systematic and comprehensive approach to the recruitment 

and selection challenges.

6. Working together on the initiative could create more opportunities for collaboration on future projects.
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Beyond these benefits, inviting community members to participate in the human resource process 

strengthens the law enforcement–community relationship and allows them to weigh in from the start 

on which officers are a good fit for community partnerships. This collaboration, like nearly all policecommunity collaboration, increases the community’s sense of ownership of its police agency and can 

increase public trust in the accountability and responsiveness of the agency.

Who Is the Community?

When law enforcement executives think about the community, the first stakeholders who come to mind are 

neighborhood activists and community leaders who have worked with law enforcement previously. But a 

community comprises a larger assortment of groups and individuals who could be enlisted as community 

partners, and each one can become a constituency of change.

Business Owners: Business owners and their trade associations have a long-term interest in keeping their 

neighborhoods safe and are often willing to lend their time and expertise to working with law enforcement. 

Larger associations, such as local chambers of commerce, can also sometimes contribute financial resources 

to specific projects.

Clergy: Local religious leaders have deeply rooted connections to their neighborhood congregations and 

occupy positions of trust and respect. They can help police identify the issues that are of greatest concern to 

the community.

Elected Officials and Administrators: Public officials are key partners of law enforcement, and their 

support is critically important to any police recruitment initiative, not least of which is their budgeting 

authority. 

Homeowner Associations: Homeowners, like business owners, have an interest in keeping their 

neighborhoods safe and are often willing to volunteer their time to that end.

Media: The media can become a strong partner in community policing initiatives, especially in recruitment. 

A long-term relationship with members of the media can help promote a positive image of law enforcement 

and explain its unique challenges. The media can also help in recruitment campaigns by giving those efforts 

more exposure. As participants in public affairs programming, law enforcement leaders can appear on talk 

shows or help create programs focused on law enforcement careers.

Military: Human resource specialists at military bases and installations are often willing to partner with 

local law enforcement agencies to help veterans who are ready to leave military service to transition into 

police work.

Minority Advocacy Groups: These groups can provide dedicated volunteers to serve on advisory 

committees or focus groups to give vital input into the recruitment and selection processes.

Neighborhood Watch Block Leaders: These individuals have already demonstrated their commitment to 

public safety and may be willing to get involved in the recruitment of law enforcement personnel who may 

one day patrol their neighborhoods.
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Postsecondary Schools: Trade schools, junior colleges, and 4-year colleges can serve as fertile grounds for 

community involvement. They can offer student internships that can provide law enforcement with valuable 

free labor as well as a pool of potential officer recruits. Teachers can offer professional assistance, either as 

a free resource (in exchange for public recognition for their academic institution) or as paid consultants for 

more complex needs.

Primary and Secondary Schools: Guidance counselors, teachers, and school administrators generally 

understand the concerns and opinions of young people and can share these views with police. They can 

influence students’ views of police by their words and actions, and by inviting police to participate in school 

assemblies and classroom events they can give police officers opportunities to talk directly to the workforce 

of the next decade.

Volunteers: Volunteers of all ages work with a wide variety of law enforcement agencies. Many of these 

volunteers bring special skills—computer database administration, for instance, or writing—to the 

partnership.

Social Service Organizations: With the increased popularity of community policing, an increased number 

of social service organizations have come to realize that they share a commonality of interests and goals 

with law enforcement agencies. Individuals working in social service agencies can be excellent resources and 

referral sources.

Youth Organizations: Law enforcement agencies can work directly with faith-based and secular youth 

groups to reach tomorrow’s applicant pool while individuals are receptive to a positive message about police 

work and old enough to start thinking about a career.

How Do We Engage the Community?

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), through its Collaborative Leadership Project 

(CLP), funded by the COPS Office, developed a model for engaging community members in police 

recruitment and selection. The CLP model—initially designed to help agencies diversify their workforce—

can be applied to recruitment and selection. The model involves three specific phases of planning and 

execution:

1. Building-block activities.

2. Stakeholder action planning.

3. Strategy implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.

Each phase, in turn, includes a series of steps a police agency can take to improve its ability to use 

recruitment resources more wisely and to meet its recruitment targets. Figure 1 on the following page 

outlines the three phases of the CLP model.
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Figure 1: Police Recruitment and Placement—Community Collaboration Model.

Building-Block Activities

Stakeholder Action Planning

Strategy Implementation, Monitoring, and Evaluation

– Document (Map)

– Evaluate

– Formulate Improvement 

Recommendations

2. Diagnose HR System

– Process

– Impact

10. Evaluate Action Initiatives

1. Diagnose Recruitment 

Population

– Conduct Market Survey

– Identify Recruitment 

Targets

– Study the Competition

3. Assemble Best 

Practices Inventory

– Recruitment

– Selection

– Retention

4. Mobilize Community and 

Government Stakeholders

– Community

– Police

– Government

– Special Interests

6. Conduct Building Block/

Information Engagement

– Target Population/Survey

– HR System Conditions

– Best Practices

7. Conduct Action and 

Implementation Engagements

– Stakeholder Action

– Initiatives

– Implementation

8. Implement Action 

Initiatives

– Change Management 

Training

– Execute Action Plans

– Generate Evaluation Data

9. Monitor Implementation 

Activities

– Monitoring

– Mid-Course Corrections

– New Conceptualization

– Action Plan Revisions

5. Conduct Orientation 

Engagements

– Engagement 

Process

– Objectives

– Communities

– Benefits

– Issues

– Trust Building

Phase 1: Building-Block Activities

Successful use of the IACP Police Recruitment and Placement Model requires agencies to learn as much 

as possible about their marketplaces and their pools of potential applicants; the structure, operation, and 

effectiveness of their recruitment and selection systems; and the best of contemporary recruitment and 

selection practices. Agencies must also enhance their own human resources processes. Each building-block 

activity is crucial to a successful outcome.

Diagnose the recruitment population: Information about current and future prospective applicants can 

help the agency focus limited recruitment resources on individuals who are most likely to seek a career 

in policing and can serve as a foundation for designing and implementing recruitment strategies. The 

most cost-effective method for collecting these data is to administer a formal survey. With funding from 

the COPS Office, the IACP Collaborative Leadership Project has produced a model survey instrument 

designed to obtain relevant characteristics and diagnose the current and future recruitment populations (see 

Appendix A). After a local police agency tailors the survey to address its own needs, it can help the agency 

develop a profile of people who are inclined to respond favorably to particular recruitment initiatives. People 

who fit this profile make up the target recruitment population.
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Identifying the target recruitment population is only one purpose of the survey. Another is to determine 

what the target recruitment population thinks of the police department. Do recruitment targets feel that the 

local police department is fair, trustworthy, and committed to workforce diversity? How do members of the 

community who have some influence on members of the target population view the department? Would 

they be willing to assist in a community-based recruitment effort?

Beyond administering the police career survey, the police department should also research the agency’s 

competition for those employees. What other local employers seek to hire from the target recruitment 

population? What enticements do these employers offer? What differentiates the police department from its 

competitors? This general and police-specific information will provide a clearer picture of the competition 

within the job market for the target population identified for recruitment. The local police agencies’ demand 

for officers, comparative salaries, and benefits are obviously all core considerations for prospective hires.

Diagnose the human resources system: Once the department has identified recruitment targets, 

conducted a market survey, and studied the competition, the second building-block activity is to diagnose 

the agency’s human resources system. Just as it is important for police executives to understand factors 

external to the agency that may affect hiring, they must also understand the internal agency practices that 

affect their recruitment and selection efforts.

In diagnosing the human resources system, police executives should first map the local testing and selection 

procedures, identifying each step of the process and placing it in context with the other step. Additionally, 

they should identify the strengths and weaknesses of jurisdictional and agency recruitment and selection 

policies and practices so that factors that contribute, or serve as barriers, to successful recruitment and 

selection can be determined. These topics may include pertinent state statutes, civil service requirements, 

workforce profiles, recruitment strategies, and selection sequences, among others. (See Appendix B for 

database development guidelines from the IACP.) 

It is important to maintain statistical data including the number of applications received, those who appear 

for the initial step of the testing process, the number who survive each subsequent step in the selection 

process, those who become eligible for appointment, and the final number selected. Data should be 

organized by race, gender, and other descriptors of local significance so that the chief executive can more 

easily identify any agency processes that may hinder recruitment and selection of members of any group. 

To identify this profile, information must be collected, isolating the race, ethnicity, and sex of applicants at 

each stage. 

The final profile required by the model concerns turnover and retention. Here, too, agencies should identify 

the sex, age, race, ethnicity, and years of service of every sworn and nonsworn member of the agency. This 

information should be grouped by rank, assignment, or position, and, where relevant, cause of departure 

(e.g., resignation, termination, disability). This information will help police tailor the recruitment message to 

prospective applicants and should also guide the agency in some of its personnel policies and practices.
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Best Practices: The third and final component of building-block activities is the inventory of best or 

promising practices. The search for these practices should include all three stages of the hiring process: 

recruitment, selection, and retention. Each has an important effect on an agency’s personnel composition. 

One should not be overlooked at the expense of another. Best practices will assist the chief executive in 

identifying policies and programs that have proven to be or are promising to be successful in increasing the 

diversity of other law enforcement organizations. Special attention should be paid to agencies with similar 

resources, recruitment concerns, demographics, and other pertinent characteristics.

Phase 2: Stakeholder Action Planning

Once an agency has developed these building-blocks, it should invite stakeholders to participate in 

community engagement sessions designed to familiarize them with the agency’s recruitment needs, find ways 

to meet those needs, and promote stakeholder commitment to meeting the agency’s recruitment goals.

Mobilize Community and Government Stakeholders: The primary objective of this phase of the model 

is to enlist groups that have a stake in meeting police recruitment goals. Core stakeholders might include 

police executives, police human resources specialists, labor and union officials, city or county human 

resources executives and specialists, the jurisdiction’s chief administrative officer (such as the city or county 

executive or mayor), the jurisdiction’s legislative body, neighborhood associations, minority interest groups, 

and special-interest groups. The law enforcement executive should lead the mobilization effort because 

commitment from the top is essential in effecting the changes required to improve the recruitment and 

selection processes. In addition, the involvement of the chief executive and the agency’s command staff can 

send a powerful and valuable message to the community: that recruitment is a priority.

Conduct Orientation Engagement Sessions: The purpose of the orientation engagement is to introduce 

stakeholders to the engagement process. The agenda should focus on objectives and components of the 

process, including stakeholder obligations (such as time commitments), benefits of participation, and police 

department recruitment needs. Orientation engagements can accommodate larger stakeholder audiences 

than are typically recommended for other types of community engagement sessions, but they should not 

exceed 50 individuals. The optimum ratio for attendees at these meetings is three citizens to every one police 

representative. The 3:1 ratio gives citizens a comfort level that they might not have at a session in which 

police outnumbered citizens.

Conduct Building Block and Information Engagement Sessions: These engagement sessions should 

convey to all stakeholders the most important aspects of the information collected during the buildingblock activities, including information collected from the target population survey, human resources system 

conditions, and identified best practices. Stakeholders need not master the complexities of the information 

but should also be made aware of the scope of the information. The department should commit to 

discovering any missing information that stakeholders feel they will need before they can create action plans.

Conduct Action and Implementation Engagement Sessions: Once stakeholders are familiar with 

recruitment and selection problems and have familiarized themselves with the information gathered during 

the building-block activities, police should conduct action and implementation engagement sessions designed 

to produce strategies for action. An action plan based on these strategies should identify the tasks required, the 

names of individuals (or groups) that will be responsible for them, and a timeline for accomplishment.
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Assigning stakeholders to action teams should generate a number of varied and complementary initiatives. 

Each team should include individuals of the different stakeholder groups so that each interest area is 

represented. Contract facilitators can provide the objectivity and planning skills required to conduct 

engagement sessions, but if such resources are unavailable, a team consisting of both a community member 

and a police representative who have the appropriate skills can facilitate these action teams.

Action plans should strive for reasonableness and practicality with regard to timetables and costs. Moreover, 

each participant who has been given a responsibility must be held accountable for its completion. Police 

executives should pay particular attention to plans, their requirements, and day-to-day realities to ensure 

that the recruitment and selection strategies can be implemented successfully.

Phase 3: Implementation, Monitoring, and Evaluation

Community engagement sessions are almost always successful: action plans are developed, community 

volunteers feel valued, police representatives gather valuable information, and groups become energized to 

start responding to the problem. But follow-up efforts are often marked by disorganization and atrophy. 

Consequently, police and community leaders must make sustained efforts to implement, monitor, and 

evaluate the plan if the initiative is to succeed.

Implement Action Initiatives: Action plans and strategies are most likely to be executed successfully when 

the police agency retains the leadership role and supplies the required resources because the police agency is 

best-situated to respond to issues that may arise during implementation. Police should involve stakeholders 

in the decision-making process because, in doing so, stakeholders will increase their investment in the 

outcomes. If community stakeholders are relied upon, motivated, and engaged in the process, they will bring 

the resources and assets of their organizations to the collaborative partnership.

Implementation teams should include representatives of the various stakeholder groups who should receive 

clear information about the plan’s objectives, task definitions, staffing, schedule, and the evolving nature 

of plans generally. Otherwise, the risk for confusion, frustration, and aggravation among both police and 

nonpolice partners in the implementation teams can be quite high.

Monitoring Implementation Activities: The police agency should monitor how the plan is actually 

implemented. Monitoring can reveal community changes and issues that were unanticipated during the 

planning process. When the environment has changed, it may become necessary to modify the plan so that 

it fits with the current landscape. Moreover, once the implementation has begun, other ideas for creative 

innovations may be discovered, thus fostering a new cycle of planning and implementation.

Evaluation: All too often, agencies overlook the importance of evaluation and are either unwilling or unable 

to assess the success or failure of initiatives. Formal evaluation, however, is a necessary component of the 

process that must be performed by government stakeholders, the police agency, or the human resource 

agency. An impact evaluation should be conducted to measure the degree to which the department’s 

recruitment objectives have been achieved, but the evaluations should not stop there. 
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A process evaluation designed to examine whether the implementation process helped or hampered the 

achievement of the plan’s stated objectives should also be conducted by monitoring the work performed. 

Actions to strengthen the process should emerge from both evaluations that can assist in the agency’s future 

recruitment and selection efforts.

What Can the Community Do?

Law enforcement agencies across the United States collaborate with community members in candidate 

recruitment and officer selection. Community representatives take part in such activities as identifying ideal 

officer characteristics and core competencies, directing recruitment efforts, marketing and branding, and 

participating on oral interview panels.

Recruitment

Identifying Ideal Officer Characteristics

Community input on ideal officer characteristics can yield surprising and helpful insights into what the 

community wants and needs from its police officers.

Example:

While reexamining its hiring practices, the St. Paul (Minnesota) Police Department sent a task force 

into the city’s neighborhoods to find out what kind of police officer people desired most. The city’s 

residents are approximately one-third minority, with substantial African-American, Latino, and Hmong 

communities. Rather than wanting more minority officers, minority residents indicated they wanted 

good people, regardless of ethnicity or gender, who cared about the community. For years, St. 

Paul had preferred to hire police officers who had experience in law enforcement or a military 

background. That preference did not necessarily lead the agency to hire the kind of officer the 

community wanted. The department shifted its recruitment focus from what the candidate had done 

in policing or a related field to what kind of person the candidate was. The department still asks 

applicants about their policing-related experience; but it also asks them about volunteer work in their 

community, coaching youth sports, service with nonprofit organizations, and activities that connect 

applicants with their community.

Marketing to Potential Recruits

Recruiting should not be a passive activity. Aggressively targeting recruits who want a career in law 

enforcement—not just a job—requires marketing an agency as a product in a manner that will attract the 

type of recruits it is looking for.

Advertisements need to reflect the values, ideals, and objectives of the agency. An agency that is seeking to 

stress its dedication to community partnerships should not emphasize law enforcement as a paramilitary 

career. It should, for example, limit advertisements that show officers standing next to SWAT tanks or 

wearing personal protective equipment.
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But policing is not just about writing tickets, either. Advertisements should emphasize the real opportunities 

for personal and professional growth available in a career in law enforcement. The targets need to be planned 

carefully, however, and strategically focused on the nature of the recruit the agency seeks to employ.

Marketing by Using the Media

Several jurisdictions have leveraged community media resources to enhance their recruitment efforts. These 

activities can often be accomplished at little or no expense.

Examples:

Prior to the launch of its “Give Back, Get More” recruitment campaign, the Detroit (Michigan) Police 

Department invited media representatives to a summit to hear its case for strong media collaboration. 

The department previewed recruitment materials for the press and solicited feedback and support 

before the full release of the campaign.

The Richmond (Virginia) Police Department obtained financial support from a local wholesale 

pharmaceutical company to develop a recruitment advertisement that was displayed prominently 

alongside application and testing information on the department’s web site.

Community Members as Recruiters

In addition to serving as advisers and focus group participants, community members in some jurisdictions 

serve as direct recruiters of police candidates.

Examples:

The Burlington (Vermont) Police Department initiated its community consultant program to help reach 

community groups that felt marginalized or uninvolved. It trained its community consultants in the 

principles of community policing in general and police recruitment specifically. It asked them for their 

reactions to the agency’s mass media messages and invited them to participate in board interviews. 

The community consultants recruited 28 potential candidates for the 104-officer department during 

the course of the project.

The Detroit (Michigan) Police Department expanded its recruiting ambassador program to involve 

community members. What was once an internal initiative to provide officers with the opportunity 

to identify potential candidates for the department is now an opportunity for community members to 

do the same. The department conducts weekly meetings with various community groups to discuss 

what is involved in becoming a Detroit police officer. It encourages community members to become 

ambassadors and gives ambassadors referral cards so that it can track the recruitment success of 

each ambassador. The department also holds a recognition ceremony at the end of each recruiting 

cycle to identify the ambassadors who have provided the department with the greatest number of 

successful recruits.
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Prerecruiting Tomorrow’s Candidates

Many law enforcement jurisdictions have recognized the importance of marketing law enforcement to 

today’s young people to enhance their understanding of civic responsibility as well as to plant the seeds for a 

future career in public safety. Using members of the community to assist in that effort makes it all the more 

effective.

Example:

The police and fire departments in Jersey City, New Jersey, deliver a 12-week course for high school 

students that exposes them to 6 weeks of police academy study and 6 weeks of fire academy study. 

The course, offered at both public and private high schools, produces a pool of potential applicants 

who have already expressed an interest in law enforcement. Recruiters hire many criminal justice 

majors from local colleges as part-time employees or department interns. A significant number of new 

employees has been generated from both of these police-community collaborative initiatives.

Working with the Military

Local police departments near large military bases have an additional source from which to recruit officers. 

But departments far from military installations can collaborate with the military, as well.

Example:

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina entered into a formal partnership 

agreement with the U.S. Army that allows the police department’s recruiters to visit Army bases in search 

of recruits. In 2006 alone, recruiters made more than 65 trips to military installations to recruit and test 

potential employees. A full-time retired police captain travels to military bases throughout the eastern and 

southern United States with application and testing materials for prospective candidates. More than 50 

percent of all new Charlotte-Mecklenburg police employees are recruited through this partnership.

Selection

Recruitment feeds the selection process, and quality recruitment leads to a quality applicant pool. 

Community participation, however, does not stop when the prospective recruit files his or her application 

and takes the exam. Community engagement in the selection process is the point at which the members of 

the community can see their contribution to the process and gain an even greater sense of ownership.

Community Participation in Oral Interviews

Oral interview participation is one of the most visible forms of community inclusion in the selection process. 

Community engagement validates agency commitment to the importance of selecting the right candidates 

to become police officers. It also demonstrates to the candidate the importance of community to the agency 

early on in his or her career.
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Oral interviews should be based on job-related knowledge and required skill sets, behaviors, and traits. 

The qualifications required for community policing should also include the community awareness factor, 

specifically the candidate’s experiences with, and interest in, community issues. Community members bring 

a unique perspective to the assessment of a candidate’s awareness of social, economic, and cultural factors at 

play in the community.

The well-constructed interview compares the candidate’s past performance with the criteria identified for job 

success and helps determine his or her suitability for employment. Oral board members should be trained 

on the proper conduct of a structured interview. Training should cover legal issues, including inadvertent 

but potential discrimination caused by irrelevant or subjective lines of questioning. (The California POST 

covers these and other issues in its video on entry-level oral interview guidelines. Agencies should check with 

their state’s POST commissions for assistance.)

Agencies should ensure that panel members understand their roles and responsibilities as members of 

the oral interview board—reiterating agency commitment to community policing, the core competencies 

of desired officers, and the agency’s overall strategic hiring vision. The degree to which community 

representatives are able to grasp this vision, and the extent of training on legal issues and interview protocols, 

should be the determining factors in an agency’s decision to include interview panel participants from 

outside the agency.

Example:

The Sacramento (California) Police Department invited community members to participate on 

cadet oral interview panels. Despite initial apprehension about working together, the sworn officer 

participants began to witness the value of the community members’ input. In fact, candidate ratings 

by trained citizens were remarkably similar to those of sworn personnel.

What Are the Challenges of Community Collaboration?

Engaging the community in the hiring and selection processes carries with it a number of challenges. The 

following paragraphs discuss some of the more common problem areas.

Apathetic or Busy Community Members

Many community members are genuinely interested in serving their communities and improving law 

enforcement, but getting their commitment isn’t always easy. Scheduling is important. Some jurisdictions 

have discovered that the best time to hold focus groups or other events involving more than 8 hours of 

commitment is on a Friday evening after 5:00 and the following Saturday. The dates for these events 

are announced months in advance to help community members prevent scheduling conflicts, combined 

with frequent reminders about the event. The cost of participation is reduced or eliminated by providing 

meals or refreshments, free parking, and in some cases paying participants a small stipend for their time or 

acknowledging their contributions with certificates of appreciation.
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An Insufficient Pool of Potential Participants

An ideal community engagement consists of the right kind and number of community members. Using 

only community members who have previously participated in collaborative efforts with law enforcement 

eventually may result in a small pool of potential participants who are strong fans of police efforts. Their 

input, while beneficial, may lack the insight and perspectives of those who may be more objective about 

police operations. In addition, some volunteers will inevitably drop out, especially if the commitment 

stretches across weeks or months. Successful departments cast the net as wide as possible to capture a large 

and diverse pool of community participants that will reflect the nature of the community.

Expectations

It is critical that police and community members have a clear understanding of expectations in their joint 

effort. A mutually agreed-on set of expectations should be developed in the early stages of community 

engagement. Community members want to feel that they will be doing something worth their time and 

effort. At the same time, law enforcement officials will have to pay attention to individual agendas that may 

conflict with the department’s policies or goals. Many jurisdictions find that a professional facilitator can 

help frame the issues, establish ground rules, mediate the discussion, and obtain group consensus.

Follow-Through

Community members who give their time and effort to work with law enforcement to improve the hiring 

and selection processes appreciate some kind of follow-up meeting or event to show that their input was 

valued and useful. Feeling good about what they did can and often does result in their participation in future 

collaborative efforts and turn them into official or unofficial community recruiters.

Resources

International Association of Chiefs of Police. Collaborative Leadership Project Community Collaboration 

Model. www.theiacp.org/About/WhatsNew/tabid/459/Default.aspx?id=459&v=1.

Maxson, Cheryl, Karen Hennigan, and David Sloan. Factors That Influence Public Opinion of Police,

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 2003.

Rinehart, Tammy A., Anna T. Laszlo, and Gwen C. Briscoe. The COPS Collaboration Toolkit: How to 

Build, Fix, and Sustain Productive Partnerships. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice Office of 

Community Oriented Policing Services, 2001. www.cops.usdoj.gov./RIC/ResourceDetail.aspx?RID=236.
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Appendix A

CAREERS IN POLICE SERVICE 

A Community Survey by the Hartford Police Department and 

The International Association of Chiefs of Police 

OUR PURPOSE 

Many police departments are having limited success in recruiting applicants and retaining 

officers, particularly minorities and women. The Hartford Police Department is one of these 

agencies. The HPD and the IACP are working collaboratively to develop information and 

strategies to promote recruitment and retention of minorities and women. This survey is 

designed to help meet this goal. Several hundred individuals, 16–35 years of age, are being 

surveyed. Citizens and community groups are assisting us. 

We seek your opinions about: 

 Law Enforcement as a Career 

 Effectiveness of the HPD Recruiting and Selection Process 

 The Hartford Police Department. 

We also ask for information about yourself. You may choose not to answer some or all of the 

questions. Be assured that you cannot be identified from the questionnaire. All surveys will be 

tabulated, retained and eventually destroyed by the IACP to protect your anonymity. 
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TO COMPLETE THE SURVEY 

The survey is made up of multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. To answer multiplechoice questions, fill in the circle with the answer that best applies. 

 Use the Number 2 pencil provided. 

 Make heavy marks that cover the circles completely. 

 Make your marks like this: 

 Do NOT mark like this:   

 Make no stray marks on the form. 

 Completely erase any responses that you wish to change. 

X 
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TO RETURN THE SURVEY 

You may return the survey to the community volunteer who is assisting your group. If you 

prefer, you may mail it directly to the IACP in the postage-prepaid envelope. (The number on 

the front enables our staff to route your survey properly. All envelopes bear the same number 

and cannot, therefore, identify you.) 

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SURVEY 

Please direct any questions you have about the survey to the citizen volunteer who is assisting 

us. If you chose to complete the survey at a later date, contact (name of survey administrator) at 

the IACP, 1-800-843-4227. 

PLEASE TURN TO SECTION ONE 
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SECTION ONE: ABOUT YOU 

1. Age: 

 Under 18  31 - 35 

 18 – 21  Over 35 

 22 – 25  Decline to state 

 26 – 30 

2. Gender: 

 Male 

 Female 

 Decline to state 

3. Race: 

 White  Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander 

 Black or African-American  Other race (specify if desired): ____________ 

 American Indian/Alaska Native  Two or more races 

 Asian  Decline to state 

4. Hispanic/Latino: 

 Yes 

 No 

 Decline to state 

5. Marital Status: 

 Single  Divorced 

 Married  Decline to state 

 Separated 
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6. Residency: 

 Live in Hartford 

Number of Years: ______ 

 Live elsewhere 

Place of Residence: ______________________________ 

Number of Years: ________________ 

 Decline to state 

7. Employment/School Status: 

(Check one or more. If unemployed, skip to Question 10) 

 Employed in Hartford 

 Full-time 

 Part-time 

 Employed elsewhere 

 Full-time 

 Part-time 

 Employed in Hartford and elsewhere 

 Full-time 

 Part-time 

 Unemployed 

 In school 

 Decline to state 

8. If employed full or part-time, state your occupation or type of job: 

____________________________________________________________________________ 

____________________________________________________________________________ 

9. Current Income: 

 Under $10,000  $40,001 – $50,000 

 $10,001 – $20,000  Over $50,000 

 $20,001 – $30,000  Decline to state 

 $30,001 – $40,000 
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10. Highest Level of Education: 

 Did not complete high school  Engaged in graduate work 

 In high school  Graduate degree 

 High school graduate (or equivalent)  Other: _______________________ 

 Associate of arts degree (or equivalent)  Decline to state 

 Bachelors degree 

SECTION TWO: LAW ENFORCEMENT CAREER 

11. Have you ever considered or would you consider a career as a law enforcement officer? 

 Yes 

 No 

 Not sure 

12. If you have considered or would consider a career in law enforcement was it or is it because 

of: 

(Check all that apply) 

 Desire to help people 

 Family influence 

 Peer influence 

 Excitement of the job 

 Social status of police officers 

 Personal (positive) experience with police 

 Salary, fringe benefits, pension 

 Job security 

 No better career alternative 

 Other (please specify): _______________________________________ 

____________________________________________________________ 

____________________________________________________________ 
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13. If you have not considered or would not consider a career in law enforcement was it or is it 

because of: 

(Check all that apply) 

 Family influence 

 Peer influence 

 Job danger/risk 

 Social status of police officers 

 Personal (negative) experience with police 

 Salary, benefits, pension 

 Job security 

 Better career alternative 

 Criminal record 

 Other (please specify): ____________________________________________ 

_______________________________________________________________ 

_______________________________________________________________ 

14. If you have considered or would consider a career in law enforcement did you/would you 

prefer to serve as a: 

 Local (city) police officer 

 County (deputy) sheriff 

 State trooper 

 Federal officer (FBI, U.S. Marshal, etc.) 

 Other (please specify): ______________________________________________ 

 No preference 

15. Police agencies employ many individuals in non-sworn, professional, technical and 

administrative capacities. Have you ever or would you consider a police career in one of 

these non-sworn/civilian capacities? 

 Yes 

 No

SECTION THREE: HPD CAREER OPPORTUNITY 

16. Are you aware that the Hartford Police Department has many openings for law 

enforcement officers? 

 Yes 

 No 
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17. Are you aware that the Hartford Police Department is under court order to increase the 

number of minority and women officers? 

 Yes 

 No

18. Have you ever heard or seen Hartford Police Department recruitment ads? 

 Yes 

 No 

19. Have you ever had personal contact with a member of the Hartford Police Department 

regarding a career in police work? 

 Yes 

 No 

If yes, did the experience: 

 Increase your interest in police work 

 Decrease your interest in police work 

 Neither increase nor decrease interest 

20. Are you aware that the Hartford Police Department has an equal opportunity hiring 

policy? 

 Yes 

 No 

21. Are you aware that the Chief of the Hartford Police Department is a minority? 

 Yes 

 No 

22. Have you ever considered or would you consider a career with the Hartford Police 

Department? 

 Yes 

 No 

 Not sure 
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23. If you have considered or would consider a career with the Hartford Police Department is it 

because of: 

(Check all that apply) 

 Desire to help people 

 Family influence 

 Peer influence 

 Excitement of the job 

 Social status of police officers 

 Personal (positive) experience with police 

 Salary, fringe benefits, pension 

 Job security 

 No better career alternative 

 Other (please specify): _______________________________________ 

____________________________________________________________ 

24. If you have not or would not consider a career with the Hartford Police Department is it 

because of: 

(Check all that apply) 

 Family influence 

 Peer influence 

 Job danger/risk 

 Social status of police officers 

 Personal (negative) experience with police 

 Salary, benefits, pension 

 Job security 

 Better career alternative 

 Criminal record 

 Other (please specify): ____________________________________________ 

_______________________________________________________________ 

25. Have you ever applied to the Hartford Police Department? 

 Yes 

 No 
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26. If you have not applied, could any of the following encourage you to consider doing so: 

(Check all that apply) 

 Recruiting by community leaders 

 Recruiting by political leaders 

 Recruiting by religious leaders 

 Meeting the chief 

 Meeting officers 

 Having an officer visit your home 

 Having a minority or woman officer visit your home 

 Reading more about the department and the job 

 Watching a video about the department 

 Touring police headquarters 

 Test preparation tutoring 

 Language tutoring 

 Citizens Academy 

 Ride-along Program 

 Change in HPD approach (philosophy) 

 Change in HPD practices (actions) 

 Better ethnic mix in the HPD 

 Better gender mix in the HPD 

 More information about salary and benefits 

 Tuition reimbursement program 

 Other (please describe): _____________________________________________ 

_________________________________________________________________ 

27. Do you have any suggestions to help the Hartford Police Department recruit officers more 

successfully? 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 
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 IF YOU HAVE APPLIED TO THE HARTFORD POLICE 

DEPARTMENT, PROCEED TO SECTION FOUR. 

 IF YOU HAVE NEVER APPLIED TO THE HARTFORD POLICE 

DEPARTMENT PROCEED TO SECTION FIVE.

SECTION FOUR: THE RECRUITMENT/SELECTION PROCESS 

28. Did you find (or are you finding) the HPD recruitment/selection process to be: 

 Extremely inefficient 

 Inefficient 

 Neither efficient nor inefficient 

 Efficient 

 Highly efficient 

If you found (or are finding) the process to be inefficient or highly inefficient, please explain 

why: 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

29. Did you experience (or are you experiencing) difficulty or concern with any of the following 

aspects of the recruitment/selection process: 

 Recruitment brochures/information  Physical agility examination 

 Recruiters  Background investigation 

 The application  Length of the process 

 Test/interview scheduling  Notification of results 

 Test/interview location  City/department service personnel 

 Written examination  Other (please specify): _____________ 

 Oral interview ________________________________ 

 Psychological examination _________________________________
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30. Do you have any suggestions to help the City of Hartford and/or the Hartford Police 

Department to improve its recruitment and selection practices? 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

______________________________________________________________________________

SECTION FIVE: THE HARTFORD POLICE DEPARTMENT 

31. Is your overall impression of American police agencies:

 Very favorable 

 Favorable 

 Neither favorable nor unfavorable 

 Unfavorable 

 Very unfavorable 

32. Is your overall impression of the Hartford Police Department:

 Very favorable 

 Favorable 

 Neither favorable nor unfavorable 

 Unfavorable 

 Very unfavorable 

33. With regard to protecting public safety and enforcing laws, is your impression of the 

Hartford Police Department: 

 Very favorable 

 Favorable 

 Neither favorable nor unfavorable 

 Unfavorable 

 Very unfavorable 
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34. With regard to service and helping the community, is your impression of the Hartford 

Police Department: 

 Very favorable 

 Favorable 

 Neither favorable nor unfavorable 

 Unfavorable 

 Very unfavorable 

35. Do you believe that the HPD protects neighborhoods: 

 Equally 

 Unequally 

36. Do you believe that the proportion of minorities and women in the HPD and the 

proportion in the city: 

 Match closely 

 Do not match closely 

37. How important is it for the HPD and the community to match racially and ethnically: 

 Very important 

 Important 

 Neither important nor unimportant 

 Not important 

Thank you for completing this survey. Your time and effort will help your community and the 

Hartford Police Department. Copies of survey results will be available from the Hartford 

Police Department.

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Appendix B

Appendix B 

RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION POLICIES AND PRACTICES: 

DATABASE DEVELOPMENT GUIDELINES 

This instrument is designed to enable users to capture and document current

recruitment and selection policies and practices, thereby establishing the database

required to determine whether and in what ways recruitment and selection

objectives can be achieved more effectively. Data collection efforts must center upon,

minimally:

 Legal Framework 

 Authority and Administration 

 Recruitment Policies and Practices 

 Selection Policies and Practices. 

A series of profiles must also be developed. The database should contain the following 

categories and elements of data, as appropriate to the jurisdictional setting and available. 

 Governing Legal Provision. Pertinent state statutes; local laws and ordinances; 

POST officer certification requirements; hiring goals/ affirmative action 

requirements; labor contract provision; court mandated actions/consent decrees. 

 Authority and Administration. Distribution of authority for and administration 

of the selection process among the civil service commission, central department 

of personnel, and police department. Responsibilities should be confirmed for: job 

description; position classification; recruitment; entry level testing; performance 

evaluation; salary and benefit negotiation and approval; personnel records; hiring 

targets (number, composition); policies, rules, and regulations. 

 Workforce Profiles. Sex, age, race, ethnicity, years of service of every sworn and 

non-sworn member of the police workforce, arrayed by rank, assignment, or 

position. Companion profiles should be developed for the jurisdiction’s remaining 

public safety/criminal justice agencies (fire service, corrections agencies). 

 Minimum Qualifications and Eligibility Standards. Minimum standards for 

application and certification, including education, drug use, gender-specific 

physical agility/performance standards, and lateral entry practices. 

 Recruitment Strategies. Strategies employed; frequency of employment; targets 

of recruitment; recruiters – number, race, gender, training; recruitment materials; 

calendars. 

 The Selection Sequence. Written, oral, psychological, and polygraph tests; 

background examination sequence. 
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 Testing and Selection Calendar. Actual total time experienced to complete the 

testing sequence and the time intervals between components; comparative 

information on the calendars of competing law enforcement agencies. 

 Tracking Profile. For hiring cycles: Number of applicants; number who appear 

for the initial step of the testing/selection process; number of “no shows”; number 

who survive each subsequent step; number who become eligible for appointment; 

number selected. These data should be aggregated by race, gender, and other 

descriptors of local significance. 

 Adverse Impact Profile. Validity, reliability and adverse impact examination. 

(Adverse impact is defined as a substantially different rate of selection in hiring, 

promotion or other employment decision, which works to the disadvantage of 

members of a race, sex, or ethnic group.) 

 Salary and Benefits Profile. Conditions of work including pay plan; benefits, 

including education and training opportunities, retirement plans; and 

union/association options. Companion information should be assembled for all 

competing law enforcement agencies and selected public and private enterprises 

in the recruitment area, usually the region. With regard to competing law 

enforcement agencies, the federal service should not be forgotten. 

 Turnover/Retention Profile. Sex, age, race, ethnicity, years of service of every 

sworn and non-sworn member of the workforce, arrayed by rank, assignment or 

position, and cause of departure – resignation, termination, disability. Exit 

interview data to profile reasons for resignation and future plans is useful. 

 Evaluations. Any studies or evaluations of recruitment/selection practices, plans 

for change.

Recruiting and staffing challenges, affected by military call-ups, retirements, homeland security obligations, 

and increased competition, exist for many law enforcement agencies across the United States. The Law 

Enforcement Recruitment Toolkit developed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) comprises 

four reports, each focusing on a different area of recruitment. The lead piece, Police Recruitment: Foundation 

Concepts, describes police departments’ changing recruitment needs, the obstacles that stand between the 

departments and their recruitment goals, and the strategies that some jurisdictions are using to overcome those 

obstacles. Each subsequent report, Recruiting for Diversity, Agency Collaboration in Police Officer Recruitment 

and Selection, and Community Partnerships in Police Recruitment, explores a specific approach to recruitment 

and provides specific examples of successes in these areas.

This toolkit is one step among many in addressing the recruitment needs of the field. The issues of 

police recruitment, selection, and retention are critical to the advancement of community policing and the 

policing profession in general. We hope this toolkit will serve as a valuable resource for law enforcement 

agencies, their administrators, and others in the community committed to advancing community policing. 

U. S. Department of Justice

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

1100 Vermont Avenue, N.W.

Washington, DC 20530

To obtain details about COPS Office programs, call the

COPS Office Response Center at 800.421.6770.

Visit COPS Online at www.cops.usdoj.gov

August 2009 

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