While national news and policymakers focused on a surge in police separations in many large city departments and identified social unrest incident to the George Floyd murder as a likely contributor, much of the public discussion unfolded amid a paucity of data. By contrast, a recent paper by Ben Grunwald (Duke), A Large-Scale Study of the Police Retention Crisis, sets out to submit prevailing conventional wisdoms to data.
To do so, the paper exploits data drawn from 6,800 local law enforcement agencies across 15 states that, taken together, serve one-half of the U.S. population. As the Figure (below) descriptively implies, the acceleration in police officer separations beginning in the summer of 2020 was not off-set by any increasing in police hiring.
While what to infer from these two trend lines is not obvious, the paper lands on two main descriptive findings. First, "the increase in separations in IPED agencies after the summer of 2020 was smaller, later, less sudden, and possibly less pervasive than the retention-crisis narrative suggests. All told, the cumulative impact on the labor force by the end of 2021 was just 1%." Second, these "[a]ggregate figures, however, mask variation at the agency level. As I show, a substantial minority of large agencies meaningfully shrank by the end of 2021.”
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