Recruitment Bonuses Haven't Led To More Officers

The post-COVID pattern in police staffing is clear: Most large and medium-sized agencies lost officers from 2019 to 2022. Those agencies mostly shrank again in 2023 and they were mostly even in 2024.

One strategy that some cities implemented to combat falling officer counts has been using large recruitment bonuses to lure new recruits to their ranks. But those agencies have failed to grow for the most part with agencies offering large recruitment bonuses mostly matching the growth patterns of other similarly sized agencies.

I found 12 cities that offered recruitment bonuses to new officers joining their departments in 2022 and 2023. All but two of those agencies were smaller in 2022 than they were in 2019, and all but one (Albuquerque) was smaller in 2024 than in 2022. There was some growth from 2023 to 2024 with 4 of the 12 agencies being bigger in 2024 than 2023 which mostly matches what happened in bigger cities over that span.

The size of the bonuses varied from reasonably small in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Cincinnati to very large bonuses in Seattle, New Orleans, and Alameda. Overall, this sample of agencies was down 10 percent from 2019 to 2022, down 6 percent from 2022 to 2024, but down just 1 percent from 2023 to 2024.

So staffing in these agencies largely matched the overall trend in big cities nationwide that I talked about a few weeks ago in spite of the recruitment. Which isn’t to say that the additional funds have not helped police departments stop shrinking. But aiming large sums of money at finding new officers hasn’t paid off suggesting there is not a financial solution to growing larger police departments.

The New Orleans and Washington DC experiences are instructive to this lesson.

New Orleans offered began offering enormous bonuses to recruits and retention bonuses to current officers. This new program was announced in February 2022 and went into effect in January 2023. NOPD had 1,163 officers and 61 recruits in mid-2019, 1,032 officers and 19 recruits when the plan was announced in February 2022, 941 officers and 11 recruits when it went into effect in January 2023, and had 896 officers and 49 recruits as of April 2025.

There was an increase in recruits hired by NOPD after the bonuses went into effect. Most of that change, however, was due to the city processing applications much quicker, speeding up the background check process, and hiring a higher share of applicants.

There were 5,622 applicants to NOPD in 2019, 2,590 in 2022, and 2,958 in 2023. Yet the city hired way more recruits in 2023 and 2024 than the combined total from 2020 to 2022.

So if the number of recruits being hired surged then why isn’t this a piece about the success of recruitment bonuses? Because the share of recruits who graduated the academy plunged. To see this I grabbed the number of recruits that were announced at each class's graduation. This isn’t an exact measure since some recruits are recycled into future classes, but it shows why the department hiring more recruits hasn’t translated to officer growth.

There have been 88 recruits hired in NOPD’s last four completed recruit classes (Recruit Class 200 to 203 for those counting at home), but just 38 people have graduated from those classes. The four classes that launched in 2019, by contrast, had 90 graduates out of 113 recruits.

Yet NOPD didn’t shrink because the department also implemented sizable retention bonuses as well. Attrition at NOPD has slowed while reinstatements of officers who had previously left has increased thanks to these bonuses.

The department’s 2023 recruitment report showed the number of separations falling from 156 on average in 2021 and 2022 to 104 in 2023. No such report for 2024 has been published yet, but a budget report to the City Council in late 2024 showed the lower attrition trend continuing through 2024.

DC provides another example of a city that implemented sizable recruitment bonuses (though no retention bonuses) in response to falling sworn staffing. DC has excellent data on staffing, recruitment, and attrition over the last 8 or so years. What it shows is that sworn staffing in DC has fallen 17 percent since late 2018.

The issue for DC is that while attrition has slowed considerably since peaking in late 2022, recruitment has not been able to pick up steam. The result is a steadily shrinking police force in spite of substantial recruitment bonuses being offered.

This assessment is relatively surface level as to the impact of recruitment and retention bonuses. Police departments grow and shrink for complex reasons and other cities may have had success or failure for a variety of those reasons. These are just two examples of agencies struggling to grow (both DC and New Orleans have announced unfulfilled plans for bigger police departments), but there is a ton of similarity between these agencies and other places nationwide.

The takeaway for me is that if I was a policymaker I would be wary at spending tons of money to hire new recruits. Lots of agencies across the country are doing similar things and few are having success. Large agencies can tread water in terms of sworn staffing these days, but very few are growing and none are growing above a snail’s pace.

That is the reality, and accepting it is critical.

Policymakers may want to expend more effort, rather, into retaining the officers they currently have given how tough of an environment it remains for hiring and graduating new qualified recruits. Policymakers should also continue to look at civilianization as a means of reducing response times and improving the efficiency of the officers they do have.

But that is a story for another day.