The Policy Agenda Sheriffs Are Ready For
Highlights from the 2026 National Sheriffs’ Association Annual Conference
Despite recent headlines about a surge in hiring at large police departments, the workforce crisis that has plagued American law enforcement in recent years remains far from solved. Ask the sheriffs who run America’s small and rural agencies, and it is obvious that workforce challenges are still top of mind.
At this year’s National Sheriffs’ Association Annual Conference our session on rebuilding the law enforcement workforce was packed. Before we got into the data, we ran an informal poll of the room. The question was simple: Is your agency still understaffed? Almost every hand in the room shot up. For a clear majority of the sheriffs and command staff in attendance, yes—their agencies remain short of where they need to be.
The Workforce Crisis Persists—and Hiring Alone Won’t Fix It
The recruitment and retention crisis in law enforcement is a major policy challenge that threatens American public safety. In 2023, resignations had climbed 47 percent above their pre-pandemic levels, significantly outpacing retirements as the source of staff attrition. In 2024, roughly 70 percent of agencies reported that recruiting was harder than it had been five years earlier. Fortunately, recent data offers a bright spot: new FBI figures show large departments growing again in 2025 after years of losses. Hiring is up and resignations are down, though the rebound is uneven and far from complete.
For the small and rural sheriffs’ offices that make up the bulk of the country’s law enforcement agencies, these workforce pressures hit hard. Agencies now operate at roughly 91 percent of authorized staffing on average, with two-thirds curtailing services like traffic enforcement, community policing and even investigations, just to keep core patrol covered. Nearly half of all local police departments employ fewer than 10 full-time officers, so when positions sit vacant, the work doesn’t disappear. The reality is that mandatory overtime, longer shifts, and chronic fatigue drive the next round of resignations. If not addressed, this is how understaffing becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop that even a fully funded hiring surge, on its own, can’t fix.
Agencies invest dozens of hours and thousands of dollars in training law enforcement candidates, despite the fact that most will never put on a uniform. Background checks take months and academies have finite seats. The temptation to lower hiring standards as a shortcut can seem like a good strategy to address labor supply challenges, however it only trades a short-term vacancy for long-term liability and broken public trust.
Low expectations for public servants can have tragic consequences. In 2024, Illinois resident Sonya Massey called 911 to report a possible prowler on her property and two Sangamon County deputies arrived to investigate. From the beginning of the body-worn camera video, [content warning: the linked video contains depictions of graphic violence] Massey is displaying clear signs of mental illness. Despite this, Deputy Sean Grayson—a man who had bounced through six Illinois law enforcement agencies in four years—shot Massey in the face. Grayson was later convicted of second-degree murder in the killing.
Not everyone is cut out for law enforcement. The research is consistent—officers with less education are less effective at deescalation and more likely to use deadly force, while those with subpar fitness levels are more prone to injury. Sheriff Darren Campbell of Iredell County, North Carolina puts it this way: “I’d rather have a vacancy than a liability.” Maintaining high standards for officers is necessary to weed out individuals unfit for service and keep communities safe. Accomplishing this mission with constrained personnel requires smart policy solutions that apply scarce officer hours on problems better solved another way.
Four Policy Priorities the Conference Put Front and Center
If law enforcement currently has to do more with a leaner workforce (without cutting corners) four policy areas surfaced again and again across the agenda.
1. Modernize, don’t dilute. Retention is more cost-effective than recruitment across the spectrum. Operationally and fiscally, convincing good officers to stay on the job is almost always preferable to hiring new recruits. States and counties should rethink pension and career-ladder structures that drive early exits, and invest in the wellness and supervision that keep good people in the profession. The conference devoted whole tracks to this—annual mental-health check-ups, fixing employee-assistance programs that officers don’t trust or use, and active-bystandership models that keep small mistakes from becoming career-ending ones. These benefits form an agency’s retention infrastructure, and determine those that will succeed in holding onto their people long enough to recoup the considerable cost of training them.
2. Scale deflection and diversion. Communities keep cycling the same low-level, behavioral-health-driven cases through the system with little to show for it. Deflection redirects appropriate individuals toward local treatment and community services instead, reserving arrest and incarceration for serious and violent crime. This law-enforcement-led, peer-reviewed crime-reduction strategy is a force multiplier—every call diverted is officer time returned to public safety. With active deflection programs in roughly 850 sites nationwide and the endorsement of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, deflection has gone from a fringe movement to a mainstream strategy. The research base for expanding deflection, including juvenile deflection, is deep and growing, and the appetite among sheriffs for practical, evidence-based models is unmistakable. The conference’s session on evidence-based deflection drew exactly the practitioners who can scale it—sheriffs who understand that reserving arrest for serious and violent crime is smart, not soft.
3. Make reentry work. Recidivism is an underappreciated workforce drain. A large share of law enforcement’s repeat business comes from the same people cycling through the system; historically, about two-thirds of those released from state prison are rearrested within three years. The conference showcased sheriff-led models built to break that cycle, such as Worcester County’s community-based reentry centers, Chautauqua County’s reentry hubs and multi-agency situation tables, and in-custody education programs like Inmate Growth Naturally and Intentionally Through Education (IGNITE). Lawmakers can help by dismantling the 40,000-plus regulatory and licensing barriers that block people with records from work and housing, and automating clean-slate record sealing so a single old mistake doesn’t guarantee a return trip to jail. Every successful reintegration is one fewer future call for service, because people who can find legitimate work and housing reoffend at lower rates. The conference’s sessions on Medicaid continuity in corrections and education models like IGNITE—which researchers have linked to measurably lower recidivism—showed how the connective tissue gets built, both in and outside the system.
4. Govern the technology wave before it governs us. These days, regardless of the specific subject or domain, policy conversations often morph into technology conversations. This was certainly the case in Omaha, whose police department was demonstrating a kinetic drone-to-gunfire workflow, using drones as first responders. Make a lap around the exhibit hall and you could see demos of real-time crime centers, while sheriffs attended sessions on Bitcoin ATM fraud investigation and artificial intelligence (AI) “playbooks” for the field. Arguably nowhere are these advancements more promising than the big data problem posed by police body camera programs. Among the most controversial applications are new automated report-writing systems that can have the first draft of the police report ready before the officer makes it back to headquarters. Clear AI policies that keep a human in the loop and set reasonable limits on facial recognition are necessary, not only to protect civil liberties, but also to shield agencies from the privacy and bias pitfalls of haphazard deployment. The technology is arriving whether or not the rules are ready, which is why building modest guardrails now is far cheaper than litigating their absence later.
The Rural Reality
It’s worth saying plainly who this affects most. Sheriffs disproportionately serve rural and mid-size jurisdictions, some of the agencies with the thinnest margins, smallest applicant pools, and least room to absorb a few unexpected vacancies. A big-city department can redeploy assets in a way that a sheriff with just a handful of rural deputies covering hundreds of square miles cannot. Evidence-based efficiencies that conserve officer time and keep good people on the job deliver their biggest returns exactly where the workforce crisis is deepest. What stood out in Omaha was not resistance to change but hunger for it. Sheriffs are pragmatists. They want approaches that reduce repeat calls, conserve personnel, and hold up in court. The recruitment and retention crisis won’t be solved by any single hire, grant, or gadget. It will be solved by policies that allow a workforce stretched to the breaking point the freedom to focus on crime. Sheriffs are ready. Now policymakers need to catch up.