Police departments across the U.S. have struggled with officer shortages in recent years but a new report showed how youth apprenticeship programs can combat the trend.
Many forces offer programs providing on-the-job training alongside classroom instruction.
Benjamin Klosky, a former researcher at the Urban Institute and a police apprentice in Fairfax County, said he became interested because he did not want to go to college or the military after graduating from high school, and still needed to earn a wage.
“If you ask a police officer what they do, they’ll tell you that everything from the marriage counselor to a social worker to a teacher to a referee,” Klosky outlined. “They have to inhabit a bunch of different roles, and not all of those roles are learned within the confines of the police academy. ”
Klosky still had to go through a vetting process, including a polygraph and background check. He was able to do productive police work, like helping run the warrant desk, handling evidence, and performing maintenance, along with shadowing patrol shifts. He acknowledged apprenticeships are costly for departments but they can provide benefits like increasing officer retention, saving money compared to academies, and recruiting more diverse workers.
For instance, many of Klosky’s fellow cadets spoke multiple languages and came from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.
“The other cadets were not people who would have otherwise gone to college and then become police officers,” Klosky observed. “These are people from the communities that are being policed who wanted to become police officers and didn’t have another route to do so.”
Officer hiring and retention have struggled since 2020 amid rising public distrust in policing and concerns over excessive force among officers. However, the trend may be starting to reverse for the first time since the pandemic, according to the Police Executive Research Forum.
