Bonuses offered to tackle police shortage

Several police departments across the United States are struggling to attract and retain new police officers, and many are offering thousands of dollars in bonuses to entice recruits.

Bill Schueller, police chief in California's Redding city, announced plans last year to increase his department's sign-on bonuses from $5,000 to $7,500. In March, Redding City Council voted 5-0 to raise the sign-on bonus for experienced police officers who join the force to $40,000.

The higher bonus will be in effect for 18 months and officers who receive it must stay with the department for three years. They will have to pay the bonus back if they leave earlier, according to the Redding Record Searchlight newspaper.

Schueller told a council meeting that a higher bonus makes "economic sense to the city and will get our officers on the street more quickly, serving our community".

He said while training a new officer can take a year, only 56 percent of trainees complete the course.

The average salary for a police officer in the US was $70,740 last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. The average range of salaries for other professions was $58,260.

In 2020, the number of police officers who were employed nationwide fell when compared with the past decade. Some suggest this may have been due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most police officers were mandated to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but many did not want to, leading some to be put on leave or legally fired in cities such as New York. Last year, the number of police officers who were employed began to return to what it was before the pandemic, the BLS said.

Police officers have come under fire from the public and civil rights groups over the past few years following violent actions of some officers nationwide toward citizens, including former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin who was convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd in 2020.

Knock-on effect

The death of Floyd sparked nationwide protests as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, which criticized police brutality. This, and other incidents, may have had a knock-on effect on the image of law enforcement to some new recruits.

In Ithaca, New York, the police department is offering $20,000 to "lateral transfers", which refers to a law enforcement agency that hires a candidate already employed as a police officer elsewhere. The bonus for the job used to be $10,000, but was raised to $15,000 after approval from Ithaca's Common Council.

The struggle to recruit or retain police officers comes as several cities experienced violent rises in crime amid the pandemic.

In the first six months of this year, figures show that while homicides fell compared with last year in 23 cities, homicides were still 39 percent higher than at the same time in 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice's Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in US Cities midyear 2022 report.

A spokesperson for New York State Senator Zellnor Myrie told China Daily that gun violence requires a holistic solution.

"Government has only used one solution in the past, and typically that has been more law enforcement. And if more police and more funding for the police was the solution, then we would have no gun crime," the spokesperson said.

"We've dedicated more and more of our funding to more patrols. That is not the only solution. It is part of the solution, but it's clearly not enough."