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Tyre Nichols case highlights US police recruiting and retention crisis

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Tyre Nichols case highlights US police recruiting and retention crisis​

No experienced supervisors attended the scene of Nichols’s deadly arrest and Memphis’s police department is hundreds of officers short of its target strength

Beyond the beating, kicking, cursing and pepper-spraying, the video of Tyre Nichols’s deadly arrest at the hands of young Memphis police officers is just as notable for what’s missing – any experienced supervisors showing up to stop them.

That points to a dangerous confluence of trends that Memphis’s police chief acknowledged have dogged the department as the city became one of the nation’s murder hotspots: a chronic shortage of officers, especially supervisors, increasing numbers of police quitting and a struggle to bring in qualified recruits.

Former Memphis police recruiters told the Associated Press of a growing desperation to fill hundreds of slots in recent years that drove the department to increase incentives and lower its standards.

“They would allow just pretty much anybody to be a police officer because they just want these numbers,” said Alvin Davis, a former lieutenant in charge of recruiting before he retired last year out of frustration.

The department offered new recruits $15,000 signing bonuses and $10,000 relocation allowances while phasing out requirements to have either college credits, military service or previous police work. All that’s now required is two years’ work experience – any work experience. The department also sought state waivers to hire applicants with criminal records and the training academy slackened fitness standards.

“I asked them what made you want to be the police and they’ll be honest – they’ll tell you it’s strictly about the money,” Davis said, adding that many recruits would ask the minimum time they would actually have to serve to keep the bonus money.

Another former patrol officer turned recruiter who recently left the department told the AP that in addition to drawing from other law enforcement agencies and college campuses, recruits were increasingly coming from jobs at the McDonald’s and Dunkin’ drive-thru outlets. A stripper applied, though didn’t get in.

“There were red flags,” said the former recruiter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel and hiring. “But we’re so far down the pyramid nobody really hears the little person.”

Many young officers, before ever walking a beat with more experienced colleagues, found themselves thrust into specialized units like the now-disbanded so-called Scorpion unit, the high-crime strike force involved in Nichols’s arrest. Their lack of experience and basic errors were shocking to veterans.

“They don’t know a felony from a misdemeanor,” Davis said.

Memphis police did not respond to requests for comment about their hiring standards. But the police chief, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, who took over in June 2021, has said supervision of less experienced officers is an urgent need, noting her department was investigating why a supervisor failed to respond to Nichols’s arrest as they should have.

“If that had happened, somebody could have been there to intercept what happened,” Davis told the AP last month.

“Culture eats policy for lunch in police departments,” she added. “If you don’t have the checks and balances you will have problems.”

The chief told city council members on Tuesday that she intended to bring in an outside party to help fill 125 new supervisor slots.

“This is a start. It’s not just the officer that has to be held accountable. It’s everybody in the chain up to the chief of police,” she said.

Of the five Scorpion team officers now charged with second-degree murder in Nichols’s 7 January beating, two had only a couple of years on the force, none had more than six years’ experience and some had blots on their records.

“If you lower standards, you can predict that you’re going to have problems because we’re recruiting from the human race,” said Ronal Serpas, the former head of the police in Nashville and New Orleans and the Washington state patrol. “There’s such a small number of people who want to do this and an infinitesimally smaller number of people we actually want doing this.”


Memphis, in many ways, stands as a microcosm of the myriad crises facing American policing. Departments from Seattle to New Orleans are struggling to fill their ranks with qualified officers amid a national movement of mounting scrutiny and calls for reform in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

Davis’s aim after taking office was to increase staff from 2,100 to 2,500, close to the size of the force a decade ago. Instead, the police ranks have dropped to 1,939 officers – like the city, majority Black – even as the population has increased and the number of homicides topped 300 in each of the past two years.

More than 1,350 officers either resigned or retired over the past decade.

Longtime observers of the Memphis police note that Nichols’s death is far from the first moment of reckoning for a department with a history of civil rights abuses and complaints of many civilian killings that have not led to federal intervention.

Such Department of Justice inquiries often result in sweeping reforms, including staffing and training overhauls.

Thaddeus Johnson, a former Memphis police officer who is now a criminal justice professor at Georgia State University, said the missed chance for federal intervention allowed the problems of the department – soaring crime, community distrust and chronic understaffing – to fester until they exploded.

“A deadly brew came together,” he said. “But that same mixture is in many other places, too, where the bubble just hasn’t burst yet.”
 
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What a mess this country is in.

One thing that stood out.

-“There’s such a small number of people who want to do this and an infinitesimally smaller number of people we actually want doing this.”
 
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