Police departments cannot reduce violence, earn public trust, or carry out meaningful reform without enough capable people to do the work. Recruitment and retention are therefore not merely human resources concerns. They are core public safety responsibilities.
Today, as principal of the O’Hara Leadership Group and a Distinguished Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Public Security, I apply lessons learned over more than two decades in policing and public safety to helping leaders rebuild organizational capacity, trust, and performance. Workforce numbers are one measure of organizational health. When a department cannot recruit qualified people, keep good employees, or develop future leaders, the failure rarely begins in the human resources office. It usually begins in the culture, systems, and daily decisions of the organization.
In my most recent role as police chief, I inherited a department that was not facing an ordinary staffing shortage. It was an organization in freefall, with severe staffing losses and a diminished recruiting pipeline. The officers who remained were carrying extraordinary workloads while the department faced urgent demands for safer streets, stronger accountability, and fundamental reform. The easy response would have been to treat recruiting as a marketing campaign. We did not have that luxury. We had to rebuild an institution that qualified candidates from the community would believe was worth joining—without retreating from reform or lowering expectations.
Over the next several years, applications more than tripled, sworn staffing began to recover, and the department became the most diverse in its history. Those outcomes represented meaningful progress, not completion. Rebuilding a workforce takes years, and no single leader or hiring class can solve the problem alone. But the strategy my team put in place showed that decline can be reversed when workforce rebuilding is treated as a central leadership responsibility.
The national picture requires candor
Police staffing remains under pressure, but the national picture is no longer one of uninterrupted decline. Among agencies responding to the Police Executive Research Forum’s 2025 survey, hiring increased 17.6 percent, total sworn staffing rose 1.4 percent, and resignations were essentially flat. Even so, staffing remained below 2020 levels, and many departments—especially large agencies—continue to compete for qualified candidates.
Those findings do not describe every department. Conditions vary by region, agency size, labor market, and community. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has also found that more than 70 percent of responding agencies considered recruiting more difficult than it had been five years earlier, while agencies averaged about 91 percent of their authorized staffing. Both realities can be true: the aggregate numbers can improve while individual departments remain in a serious staffing crisis.
Leaders should resist two unhelpful, extreme narratives. One suggests that the crisis is over; the other that no one wants to be a police officer anymore. Neither is true. Repeating a message of hopelessness can damage recruiting as surely as ignoring real problems. Candidates deserve candor about the difficulty of the profession, but they also need to hear a credible case for how meaningful and life-changing a career in service can be.
Speed and standards can coexist
Today, qualified applicants have no shortage of choices. Agencies lose them when hiring processes move slowly because of poor handoffs, a lack of sustained communication, or no clear ownership of the candidate’s experience. Every department should map the full process, identify where candidates wait, assign responsibility for each stage, aggressively maintain regular contact, and coordinate background investigations, medical and psychological screening, and academy scheduling as efficiently as law and sound practice allow.
Moving with urgency does not mean taking shortcuts. Rigor and delay are not the same thing. Departments must preserve rigorous, job-related standards for integrity, judgment, physical readiness, and public service. At the same time, they should consider removing requirements that do not predict job performance, help applicants prepare to meet legitimate standards, and evaluate prior conduct consistently, proportionately, and in context without compromising integrity requirements. A process can be both demanding and fair.
The recruiting message must be equally honest. This is difficult work that demands sound judgment, restraint, and public accountability, but it is also consequential public service. Candidates respond to a clear mission, credible leadership, opportunities to grow, and proof that high performance, employee support, and accountability are more than slogans.
Retention is an executive responsibility
Hiring is not success if the organization cannot keep the people it recruits. Retention is the accumulated result of an employee’s daily experience—whether expectations are clear, discipline is consistent, supervisors are equipped to lead, good work is recognized, development is available, and employees have the information and support needed to do the job well.
Frontline supervisors have enormous influence, but senior leaders own the conditions in which those supervisors operate. Executives select and develop supervisors, set priorities, align policy with training, allocate resources, and explain difficult decisions. Culture cannot be delegated and then blamed on the people closest to the work.
My experience helping lead Newark’s successful implementation of a federal consent decree reinforced this lesson. Reform can improve organizational health when leaders translate policy into practical training, set clear expectations, provide effective supervision, and apply accountability fairly. Poorly explained or inconsistently implemented change produces confusion and cynicism. Well-led reform gives employees and the public a clearer understanding of what good policing requires.
Police leaders should reject the false choice between reform and support. Accountability without support exhausts even the best employees. Support without accountability forfeits legitimacy. Reform, accountability, workforce support, and effective enforcement are not competing priorities. A healthy department must deliver all four.
Representation is operational capacity
A police department should reflect the people it serves, but representation is not simply an image or branding goal. Different languages, experiences, and perspectives strengthen problem solving, improve communication, and help an organization understand how its actions are experienced across a community. That capability matters during routine encounters as much as it does during a crisis.
Achieving it requires more than a broad promise to recruit diverse candidates. Leaders must examine every stage of the process: where do candidates first hear about the department, who applies, where applicants withdraw or are screened out, who completes the academy and field training program and who receives mentoring, specialized assignments, and promotion opportunities. A diverse recruiting class is not enough if talented employees do not experience genuine inclusion and a fair chance to advance.
This work should strengthen standards, not weaken them. Requirements should be clearly related to the job. Preparation programs should give candidates a fair opportunity to meet them. Recruiting should extend beyond familiar networks. Background decisions should be consistent. The objective is not to change the definition of excellence; it is to ensure that capable people are not excluded by unnecessary barriers or uneven processes.
Measure the entire workforce system
Most departments closely track authorized and actual staffing. Those figures matter, but they do not explain why a workforce is growing or shrinking. Leaders also need to review application sources, time spent at every hiring stage, withdrawal and disqualification patterns, academy and probation completion, retention at one, three, and five years, promotion and assignment patterns, and the reasons employees leave. The data should be examined across demographic groups and organizational units so that leaders can identify where a seemingly neutral process produces an avoidable loss of talent.
These indicators belong in the same executive conversation as crime, use of force, community trust, and organizational performance. Data does not replace judgment—it enhances judgment. It allows leaders to distinguish a widespread problem from an anecdote, test whether an intervention is working, and make adjustments before a temporary setback becomes another prolonged decline.
The real leadership test
Recruitment, retention, and representation are not separate challenges; they are parts of a single system. Each officer moves from application and hiring through the academy and field training, then into a workplace shaped by organizational culture, leadership, and supervision. The community ultimately experiences the officer that system develops. A weakness at any stage carries forward, affecting both the workforce the department retains and how the public experiences policing.
The goal is not merely to fill vacancies. It is to build an institution worthy of the commitment the profession demands. One that acts with urgency while preserving standards, supports employees while holding them accountable, broadens opportunity while measuring performance, and earns trust through how its actions every day.
Across two very different reform environments, I learned that staffing and reform are inseparable. You need people to carry out reform, but you cannot wait for staffing to recover before reform begins. Reform must shape the rebuild from day one.
Police executives should be judged not by a slogan, a recruiting campaign, or a single academy class, but by whether they create a durable system that attracts capable people, develops them, keeps the best of them, and serves the public well. That work is unfinished in every department. My experience leading organizations through workforce collapse and consent decree reform convinces me that it is also possible.
Recruitment, retention, and representation ultimately present one leadership question: What kind of department are we asking people to devote their lives to? Our answer should be visible in how we lead.
Written by Brian O’Hara
About the author
Brian O’Hara is a public safety executive based in the Greater New York City metropolitan area. He is principal of O’Hara Leadership Group, LLC and a Distinguished Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Public Security. His work focuses on public safety leadership, organizational reform, crisis leadership, and workforce resilience. His prior executive experience includes service as a police chief and as Newark, New Jersey’s Public Safety Director.
Views are the author’s own.
Sources and data notes
The national sources below support the broader workforce context in this draft. The first-person case-study results were verified against official public reporting retained in the editorial record. Data should be rechecked immediately before publication.
Police Executive Research Forum: Police Staffing Trends Through 2025 (May 23, 2026).
International Association of Chiefs of Police: 2024 Recruitment and Retention Survey Results (revised May 2025).
U.S. Department of Justice: Biography and Newark public safety record of Brian O’Hara (December 14, 2022).
