Police Shortages, Historically Low Recruitment, High Retirement Rates Thanks to Woke Policies Causing Serious Problems in Many Cities

There is a police shortage across the country, mainly in Democrat-run cities, and I don’t think anyone is sitting around scratching their head wondering why.

After radical leftist movements like Abolish the Police and Defund the Police along with non-stop anti-police reporting by the mainstream news media and Democrat politicians throwing police under the bus and watching city councils making rules that block police from being able to do their jobs safely, it’s no wonder cops are reacting by leaving the job and recruitment drives fizzling out.

You have to be a special kind of citizen in the first place to want to become a police officer and serve communities. But the war on cops across the country has taken its toll enough to override the calling for many of those potential recruits.

In Los Angeles, after the city council cut $150 million from the LAPD’s budget, crime skyrocketed. Crime got so bad that City Council voted to increase police funding by $36 million, even though the department asked for $111 million to do their jobs effectively.

The Philadelphia Police Department is short nearly 270 officers, and that number is expected to increase in the near future.

“From Jan. 1 through Thursday, 79 Philadelphia officers have been accepted into the city’s Deferred Retirement Option Program, meaning they intend to retire within four years, according to Mayor Jim Kenney’s office,” (the People’s Republic of) Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “During the same time period last year, just 13 officers had been accepted into the program, the office said.”

“It’s the perfect storm. We are anticipating that the department is going to be understaffed by several hundred members because hundreds of guys are either retiring or taking other jobs and leaving the department,” Mike Neilon, spokesperson for the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, told the outlet.

New Jersey just across the river is facing a “recruiting crisis,” says Pat Colligan, president of the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association.

Colligan pointed out that recent high-profile police-related deaths such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, and others have had a negative impact on police recruitment.

“Every action has a reaction. When you vilify every police officer for every bad police officer’s decision, [people] don’t want to take this job anymore,”  Colligan said. “It’s been a very trying and difficult time to put on the badge every day.”

Colligan also noted that the “quality has really diminished in the last few years,” meaning the police department no longer has the luxury of weeding through recruits to pick the best ones, and that could spell more tragic police encounters in the future.

There is also the fact that many suspects today resist arrest and cause their own fatality as officers are trying to protect themselves or others from a violent response when the cops are attempting to make an arrest, but the angry Woke mob today along with a Fake News media and their obligatory trash reporting of cops even when police acted accordingly makes it appear that all cops are bad. That false perception of police keeps good men and women away from the job.

Colonel Patrick Callahan, Acting Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said they received a “historically low” number of applications this year. In the past, they usually took in between 15,000 to 20,000 applications, while this year they only got 2,023 qualified applicants as of Thursday, NJ.com reported.

“The atmosphere with police work right now is people just don’t want to apply,” according to the New Jersey State Fraternal Order of Police Robert Fox.

Can anyone blame them? And what about the people in neighborhoods that need police protection? I have convinced many of those folks of the lie that cops are hunting down black men. So they hate the cops until they need one. That’s not a great recipe for police-community relations.

Baltimore, the city where mayors and district attorneys throw their cops under the bus, is also suffering from “recruitment and retention issues,” according to the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, so much so that they’re talking about closing police districts. And this is going on while crime is skyrocketing thanks to stupid decisions by Democrat politicians who passed asinine legislation to defund police just because they had no way to answer why their communities are nothing but rot. It appears that Democrats have been trashing police just to score political points with the progressive Woke Supremacy and that’s despicable.

“Our Patrol numbers are now below 700 officers which is about 300-400 below what is needed,” the Baltimore FOP as reported by WBFF-TV. “This creates huge safety issues for our officers and for the citizens of Baltimore.”

Albany, NY Police Chief Michael Persley said we should meet their shortage of cops with higher incentives to bring in new recruits. You could offer them a Mercedes and you won’t get people stupid enough to join the force today after the way the Democrat politicians are treating the men and women of law enforcement. It’s a very tough job, even without the constant scapegoating and trashing they take.

And where would we be without blaming COVID? Officials have blamed the pandemic for police shortages, as police academy classes were suspended.

“And you got to remember that once you go into the academy, it takes you about 10 months to finish. So, we’re not looking at putting any boots on the ground until maybe next Spring,” John McNesby, President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5 told WPVI-TV.

Let’s hope communities can hold out that long.