Concerns about crime and public safety have been top of mind for Philadelphians. It was a leading factor in the recent mayoral election, with voters choosing Democratic candidate Cherelle Parker, who vowed to be tough on crime and is pushing to hire hundreds more officers to walk the beat.
The hope is to get more recruits hired to plug about 836 vacancies the department faces in its 6,000-officer force. Combined with around 470 officers who aren’t able to be on street duty due to injuries, the department is well below the staffing levels it has the budget for.
When evaluating their policies to try to bring on more cadets, officers saw the impact a graduation-level physical fitness exam had. In 2024, they hope to hire a minimum of 350 recruits — a 167% increase in personnel hired.
“We service a big demographic of people. Bringing people in from all those demographics, I think, is critical,” Walker said. “By looking at these barriers to entry, teaching people there are opportunities and listening to people who are testing, I think that’s where policing needs to be.”
Departments small and large across the country are facing challenges, said Chuck Wexler, executive director for Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit policing think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Officers are resigning or retiring at higher rates than applicants are becoming officers, he said. Even though more people are beginning to apply, there’s still a gap.
The hiring crisis has been far more pervasive than Wexler has seen before. Additional scrutiny applied to police officers in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd has had an impact on the amount of people who want the job, he said.
Earlier this year in Pennsylvania, the governor removed a requirement for applicants to have at least 60 college credits to be a state trooper. Applications surged within a month, with nearly half of the aspiring cadets having been previously ineligible, the Pennsylvania State Police said.
In Philadelphia, Tyler Derr, 29, was driven to become an officer because he wanted to be a public servant. After passing four phases of the physical exam, he said he found it easy.
“I think if anybody takes care of themselves and is physically active, this should be pretty easy for them,” he said, cautioning against lowering standards too much.
“I still think we should be holding ourselves to a high standard, physically and morally,” he said.
It was something Wexler cautioned too — you can tweak standards to open up wider opportunities, but you can’t make a mistake in hiring.
“It only takes one bad officer to bring down a department and impact an entire city. We saw that in Minneapolis,” he said. “The one thing you can’t make a mistake on is character.”