Dozens of Conn. PDs Struggle with Staffing: 'Recruiting is Harder Today'

Numerous departments that use PoliceApp for recruiting are also seeking certified officers — which cuts down on the time it takes to get a newly-hired officer through the training process and onto the streets. About 68 agencies in the state are seeking certified officers, PoliceApp indicates. Some departments, like those in Southington, Plainville, and Stonington, have more than one listing for a certified officer.

PoliceApp does not take into account agencies like Bristol, where Morello said his department is down nearly half a dozen officers. Bristol, like some other agencies in the state, is conducting its own recruiting campaign and is not currently using PoliceApp.

The challenges facing police departments around the state are not unique to Connecticut and have been seen on a national level. The desire to join law enforcement has not been the same since a summer of demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, which was preceded by the Ferguson unrest years earlier.

“I think a lot has to do with the perception of law enforcement, but I think we’ve done a very good job in countering that,” Morello said. “But I don’t know if there’s a magic formula to get us as an institution back to numbers that we once had. Years ago, you’d have hundreds of applicants for one position. And now, we’re not seeing anywhere near that.”

“What happened was law enforcement as a whole got targeted with overall a negative implication,” Morello said. “And that’s just not the reality, so we have an uphill battle in countering that narrative. Law enforcement really is an honorable profession that serves the community at whole very well. The reality is, statistically, law enforcement does a great job in serving the communities.”

Louis J. Fusaro, Jr., chief of the Town of Groton Police Department, said his department is also not seeing the applicant numbers it did before the pandemic, though it has gotten somewhat better over the past year or two. It pales in comparison, however, to the number of people who were looking to become police officers 10, 20 or even 30 years ago, he said.

“Right now, the pool of applicants certainly isn’t what it was,” Fusaro said. “And that’s not unique to my department. It’s kind of across the spectrum of law enforcement agencies, certainly throughout the Northeast, but throughout the country as well.”

Fusaro said he recently attended a meeting with other chiefs in New England where other department leaders expressed the same concerns about finding new applicants.

“The message is all the same: It is a challenge,” Fusaro said. “Your recruiting, your retention in law enforcement today is challenging.”

“Our department isn’t unique when it comes to the recruitment challenges many agencies are facing,” said Capt. Joseph Murgo of the East Haven Police Department, who added that he believes a number of factors have likely contributed to the issue. “While our applicant numbers have been down in recent years, we’ve started to see a slight rebound.”

In addition to the hurdles in attracting new applicants, Murgo said, getting them through the hiring process is a challenge in itself.

“The background investigation phase tends to eliminate a large portion of candidates,” Murgo said. “And for those who make it past that, they still have to complete a polygraph examination and a psychological evaluation to ensure they are fit to serve in a demanding, often unpredictable profession.”

Midnight shifts

Mike Lawlor, who serves on the New Haven board of police commissioners and works as an associate professor at the University of New Haven Criminal Justice Department, said he agrees that the falloff in police candidates stems from a number of factors, including financial considerations. Connecticut is competitive when comparing police salaries to other states, but the pensions aren’t what they used to be, he said.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, data from May 2024 shows that the average police officer in the state earned an annual mean wage of $83,210. The data includes a separate category for police supervisors, whose annual mean wage was $115,310. According to Indeed, the average base salary of a Connecticut officer is 14% higher than the national average.

But Lawlor said many cities and towns over the years started to do away with defined benefit pensions and move in the direction of plans that resembled more of a 401K. It used to be common practice among police to put their 20 or 25 years in, retire with a pension, and move to another job where they could pursue a second pension, he said. In recent years, some municipalities have started moving back toward pension plans and other benefits to make their departments more attractive.

Another barrier to getting more people into law enforcement, Lawlor said, is the false narrative surrounding some elements in the police accountability laws the state passed in 2020. Perhaps the biggest falsehood, he said, surrounds the idea that an officer could lose his or her home, pension or other assets because of the loss of qualified immunity.

“No, that actually can’t happen,” said Lawlor, who previously served as former Gov. Dannel Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning in the Office of Policy and Management. “It’s impossible. It’s prohibited by law.”

According to Lawlor, if an officer cannot stop a lawsuit through qualified immunity and the complainant is awarded a judgment against them, “long-standing Connecticut law” protects them from having to pay out of their own pocket.

“You pay nothing, your employer — the town, the city, the state — they pay,” Lawlor said. “So, there’s no way you’re losing a nickel because of anything that’s in the police accountability bill.”

Morello said the uphill recruitment battle is further complicated by the inherent risk — albeit unlikely in Connecticut — of being killed in the line of duty.

“Others are less inclined to enter a profession where that risk is, while small, still a reality,” he said.

In addition to the dangers of policing being a deterrent, Lawlor said many people seem to be more drawn to jobs that offer things law enforcement simply cannot.

“This phenomenon that you see is actually a global phenomenon because, at our university, we work with police departments, public safety folks around the world, and they’re all complaining that it’s difficult to hire people these days,” Lawlor said. “And if you think about it, this makes perfect sense because there are so many other options for people to get jobs which don’t require you to work all night and they’re going to hold you over on a double shift, and you’re not going to get killed.”

“If you’ve got your act together, there’s a lot of good jobs out there, like really good jobs that pay very well and they’re closer to a 9 to 5, work-from-home type situation,” Lawlor said. “And so, not many people want to take a job where you start off your first five years working midnight shifts.”

Fusaro said the flexibility jobs in the private sector can offer is just not feasible in law enforcement or other first responder careers.

“One of the challenges that we have when we talk to new officers is we’re in a 24-7-365 business,” Fusaro said. “Police officers, public safety officials, we don’t have the luxury of working from home. Our officers are out there on the streets, they’re working weekends, holidays, good weather, bad weather.”

“Some of the luxuries that the rest of the working world has don’t lend itself to public safety,” Fusaro said. “So that’s one of those issues that we compete with.”

Another challenge is the sheer length of time it takes to replace an officer. Entry level officers are required to train for six months once there’s an opening at one of the state’s police academies, followed by about three months or more of field training with their department. In total, it could be about a year from the time someone is hired until they are out on patrol alone.

“It takes somebody two weeks to give their notice, and it takes a year to replace them,” Morello said.

Though it appears to be a trend affecting a good chunk of law enforcement agencies, not all departments across the state see recruitment as an issue.

“We’re doing quite well,” said Fernando Spagnolo, chief of the Waterbury Police Department.

“We’ve had really good luck recruiting,” he said. “And we’ve had good luck retaining. Our attrition rate is significantly lower over the last couple of years, so maybe we’re the outlier.”

Spagnolo attributed the department’s successful recruitment efforts to the terms of the city’s latest collective bargaining agreement and the accompanying benefits. He said the department also began accepting lateral transfers of officers, both from within Connecticut and out of state, in 2022 — when an interest in law enforcement was among its lowest.

Waterbury currently has 296 officers, which left it only four shy of being fully staffed before the department was recently budgeted for an additional 15 officers.

“So we are currently recruiting, and we’ve got a really strong pool of candidates to run an academy in the fall,” Spagnolo said.

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