There are 19 article(s) tagged police recruitment:
At least 15 city employees traveled to the Caribbean island for a recruiting fair last July. The event, designed to attract police officers and employees for other hard-to-fill jobs, failed to attract a single candidate.
The narrative around policing has changed in recent years, adding to the challenge of recruiting and retaining officers here and across the country. But Jhyunn Armstrong, soon to become a Shelby County Sheriff’s deputy, is following his dream.
Mayor Jim Strickland touted the proposal, on its way to the Memphis City Council for the next budget season, as a way to retain and recruit public safety employees in the police and fire departments. For the police and fire unions, the proposal is the second part of a two-part push to restore what the City Council cut.
Opinion: Loosening the residency requirement for both the Memphis Police Department and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office is not the sole answer to the law enforcement shortage, but it is a needed and effective tool in recruitment and retention efforts.
The Daily Memphian compares top pay and pay ranges for the county’s six law enforcement agencies and finds that the area’s smaller police departments pay more.
The MPD has gone from 2,449 officers a decade ago to slightly more than 1,900 today. The problem is national but also unique to Memphis in some ways.
C.J. Davis: ‘If you have need of an officer’s help it should not matter where that officer lives, but that they answered the call quickly and acted professionally.'
The recruitment ad was part of a series of ads planned as the department seeks to increase its force size.
Cops are confronting COVID-19 in an era of national "anti-police" sentiment. Local police acknowledge some reform is required, noting the emphasis on "duty to intervene." But they also say the current environment is chipping away at officer morale and may keep some young people from choosing law enforcement as a career.
Council members Michalyn Easter-Thomas and Chase Carlisle were on opposite sides of the council's veto override vote on police residency this week. On "Behind The Headlines" they talked about how many police are enough and how to get to the bigger issues beyond the numbers in the ranks.
Two proposals with common political ground were before the council Tuesday.
The competing items are both up for discussion at an afternoon council committee session with a final vote by the council later Tuesday on doing away with the November ballot question that would allow police officers to live outside Shelby County.
Phyllis Betts and Richard Janikowski have set a new bar for growing the Memphis Police Department ranks to 2,800. They talked on The Daily Memphian Politics Podcast about calls for more police amid calls locally for changing the fundamentals of policing and even the share of government funds devoted to policing.
If approved, it would call on Mayor Jim Strickland to submit a plan by Oct. 6 for getting to 2,800 police officers by the end of 2023.
The two-pronged effort comes as two criminal justice consultants instrumental in the Blue Crush police strategy are again working with the city and recommending a police force larger than the goal of 2,300 officers by the end of this year.
A city task force on public safety started its work this week with several calls for hiring local in the police and fire ranks. Meanwhile, an effort to remove from the Nov. 3 election ballot a proposal for allowing the city to hire police and firefighters who live outside the county may be picking up momentum.
The Shelby County sheriff is suggesting a more specific residency requirement, with limits, than the one that failed on first reading Monday before the Shelby County Commission.
Collierville Police Chief David Tillner is retiring immediately. The decision comes after months of dissatisfaction in the department among officers. The board will recruit a new chief in 2020.
Memphis and other cities across the country say declining interest in police work has made it harder to recruit officers, but they're stepping up recruitment efforts in response.
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