MPD got an extra ~$5M to hire more police...it's not going well

MPD is only on pace to hit 42% of its hiring goal

There’s been enormous political, media and public interest in how many police officers are in the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). Many political leaders have focused on growing MPD’s officer ranks from its current 3,287 to levels between 3,800-4,200. However, actual recruitment is falling far below MPD’s goals and at this point its unclear if MPD recruiting can even keep up with attrition:

• Monthly MPD hiring since the start of Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 in October is down 36% despite a 106% increase in recruitment funding over FY 2022

• MPD planned to hire 258 officers in FY 2023 but are only on pace to hire 108, well below current attrition rates

• MPD has churned through 4 recruitment directors in the last 4 years

New MPD recruits train at the academy for ~7 months before graduating and becoming officers. MPD’s staffing reports are updated monthly and show both the current count of recruits in training and new hires joining MPD by month. This data shows a pretty clear story:

• MPD hiring slowed from 22 per month in FY 2018 to 18 per month in FY 2020.

• MPD stopped hiring for most of FY21 (its recruitment budget was decreased from $4.6M in FY 2020 to $2.9M in FY 2021), lowering the monthly average to 3 hires.

• In FY 2022 MPD’s recruitment budget increased to $4.7M and hiring rebounded but only to 14 per month.

• In FY 2023 MPD’s recruitment budget doubled to $9.5M (with $20K hiring bonuses for new recruits) but so far hiring is only averaging 9 officers per month.

The FY 2023 budget document explained the funding increase as “A proposed one-time increase of $5,370,000 in the Professional Development Bureau will support recruitment by offering $20,000 to 258 recruits.” To hit the goal of 258 new recruits, MPD would need to hire 28 officers every single month for the rest of the fiscal year. That is incredibly unlikely. MPD has not hired that many officers in a single month in over 2 years. Doing that consistently for 8 months straight is probably impossible.

At the current pace, MPD would hire 108 officers this entire fiscal year. For context, MPD has lost 141 officers in just the first 4 months of the fiscal year. So MPD’s staffing is very likely to continue to shrink even as the recruitment budget has doubled and officers just secured a 10% pay raise in their new contract. If DC is serious about increasing the size of MPD (or even just offsetting attrition) leaders probably need to be more creative than just engaging in a bidding war with neighboring jurisdictions for the same small pool of traditional applicants:

The challenges hiring police are a national phenomenon, so DC’s struggles aren’t unique to local factors. But one obvious place to investigate is MPD’s recruiting leadership. The data in DC and nationwide show that police recruiting is hard and honestly pretty different from other police work. But MPD has churned through (at least) 4 different recruiting directors in 4 years according to oversight documents and the MPD website:

• Current Director: Captain Michael Jones

• Director on 3/2/2022 (Performance Oversight Document) through at least May 2022 (media story): Captain Paul Hrebenak

• Director on 3/27/2021 (Performance Oversight Document): Program Manager Stacy Small

• Director on 2/11/2020 (Performance Oversight Document): Director Kathleen Crenshaw

It’s impossible to tell from public data if any of these personnel moves were bad but the incredibly short tenures in this critical role are concerning; especially given how much public interest there is in MPD recruiting.

MPD’s working conditions and culture are worth standalone posts but we should consider them when evaluating why hiring incentives have failed. The website Glassdoor isn’t a perfect random sample (and they still list Chief Newsham as “CEO”) but it’s good to hear what officers have to say: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Metropolitan-Police-Department-of-Washington-DC-Reviews-E204103.htm

Notably, officers rated “Comp & Benefits” pretty highly while work hours, scheduling and management dominate the negative reviews. It’s pretty likely that MPD officers are sharing these complaints with their social circles and these realities are dampening some Washingtonians’ interest in joining. Those sorts of everyday quality of life questions for officers should merit at least as much attention as overall budget numbers when thinking about how to attract and retain talent.

As always, thanks for reading and in future posts we’ll be looking at how MPD deploys its 3K officers and how that corresponds with crime rates.