About Those Police Manpower Shortages…
by James A. Bacon
Virginia voices calling for the defunding of police departments have quieted in the past year or two, but the manpower shortage in Virginia’s law-enforcement agencies persists.
According to data released in the Virginia State Police “Crime in Virginia 2023″ report, police and sheriff departments, the state police, university police, and miscellaneous agencies managed to increase their ranks by 347 officers, or about 1.2% compared to the year before. (The number of civilian employees actually declined by about 100.)
But local media report that law-enforcement agencies are still lamenting their inability to fill their ranks. The City of Richmond, down 160 employees, graduated only 10 recruits from the city’s police training program in March, according to WWBT. The Fairfax County Police Department has more than 200 vacancies, reported WJLA in June. Schools across Hampton Roads are complaining of a shortage of school resource officers, said WTKR earlier this week.
The annual Crime in Virginia reports contain a section on the level of law-enforcement staffing. The number of law enforcement employees tallied in 2023 stood at almost exactly the same number as in 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests/riots and the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic.
If the overall level of law-enforcement employees in Virginia remains the same as in 2020, the big public-policy question is why so many departments are struggling with manpower shortages.
The level of hostility toward law enforcement in 2020 was intense. Politicians and pundits called for cutting police funding and “reimagining” law enforcement. Prosecutors promised to combat systemic racism in the criminal justice system. Protesters spray painted the ubiquitous slogan, “All Police Are Bastards.” In some localities, police chiefs were cashiered.
Law-enforcement morale plummeted. The number of officers — the men and women in the field — shrank by 1,400, or 6%, the following year, even as the number of civilians working in offices stayed roughly the same.
(It is impossible to tell from the data if current numbers represent an increase or decrease from before the riots and epidemic. In its “Crime in Virginia 2000” report, VSP began counting categories of employees that it had omitted previously.)
While the overall numbers show an incremental gain in the number of law-enforcement employees since 2000, different law-enforcement categories fared differently.
The biggest loss occurred in the county/town category: down 2,327, or 15%. It is impossible to tell from the VSP data if the decline was seen across the board or was concentrated in particular localities (such as Fairfax County).
City police departments actually gained 77 employees overall, or about 1%.
College and university police grew significantly, adding 183 positions for a gain of 19%.
The number of Virginia State Police employees declined by 25, or about 1%.
The biggest gainer was the miscellaneous category of “other,” adding 444 employees, or 25%.
(The Crime in Virginia report does not define “other,” but it likely includes some or all of law-enforcement employees with the Department of Wildlife Resources Conservation, the Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Marine Resources Commission, Capitol Police, port authorities, and tribal police.)
One hypothesis for the perception of manpower shortages is that between 2000 and 2003 many officers abandoned traditional law enforcement roles with city and county departments in favor of less stressful positions with campus police departments and low-profile state agencies. In this view, the positions hardest to fill — thus, the locus of the shortages — are the ones most likely to expose officers to hostile elements in the population more likely to hurl insults, resist arrest, and even assault them.
Another hypothesis is that increased crime spurred localities to fund an increased number of law-enforcement positions that departments have been unable to fill. The anti-police clamor has died down and, amidst higher crime rates, local governments reversed course. In this view, the shortage reflects not so much a decrease in the supply of police officers but an increased demand. Unfortunately, the Crime in Virginia report does not include the locality-by-locality budgetary data that would allow us to evaluate the proposition.
One of the few things that can be said with certainty is that, despite the widespread perception of police manpower shortages, the actual number of law-enforcement employees is little changed from 2000.