Police forces are lowering education standards to salve shortages. Why does it matter?

Where older generations often found purpose in police work as a lifetime commitment to community service, younger people are more likely to spurn the grueling hours and increasingly negative perceptions around the pathway in favor of less demanding jobs with better pay and built-in flexibilities. And they also are more likely to be wary of risks associated with the job, said Jillian Snider, a former police officer with the NYPD who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“We have both a recruitment and a retention issue,” she said during an interview, noting that there has been a marked shift since the early 2000s, an era of high patriotism and civic engagement when people chose to go into the policing profession “in response to 9/11” and soldiers were returning home from fighing in the Iraq war “and were coming into the job.” 

“You’re not seeing an appetite for a career in law enforcement of the younger generation, these individuals that are in their late teens, early 20s, who are starting to think, what am I going to do when I become a grown-up? They’re not seeing these long-term, 20, 25, and 30-year careers. They are going into jobs for 3,4,5 years and then moving on to something else,” Snider added. “One of the biggest motivators in that generation is pay. Law enforcement, historically, does not pay high, more competitive salaries in a lot of jurisdictions.” 

Many have pointed to the Black Lives Matter Movement that burgeoned in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody in 2020 as the turning point in public opinion against law enforcement. 

But the shift, Snider suggested, happened several years before, in 2014, when Eric Garner died while in the NYPD’s custody, with his death sparking the “I can’t breathe” chant favored by anti-police BLM protestors.