Houston Police Staffing Surges to 20-Year High, Mirrors U.S. Trend

A year after Mayor John Whitmire secured city council approval of nearly $1 billion in police raises over five years, the Houston Police Department has more officers in its ranks than at any time in the last two decades.

Whitmire and police union leaders have praised the uptick, tying it to improved morale and the lucrative new contract, but experts say rising staffing levels are a trend in law enforcement agencies across the country.

"Our new contract appears to be bringing people in," said Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, in a previous interview with the Houston Chronicle. He declined to comment for this story.

But public safety agencies nationwide are reporting improved staffing numbers — including departments that haven't handed out 36.5% in raises to officers, as Houston did.

"We're seeing incremental increases the last few years, things are stabilizing," said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington D.C.-based police think tank. "Overall, staffing is better than it has been in years."

Seven of the 10 biggest Texas police agencies saw an increase in officer headcounts between 2024 and 2025, state data show, led by Fort Worth.

HPD's headcount reached 5,364 in March. That's the highest in at least 20 years, according to city records.

The department actually recruited more officers in its 2024 fiscal year — before the raises were approved — than in the last fiscal year or as of April in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, city data show.

But the number of officers leaving the department has dropped significantly, from 269 in 2024 down to 149 as of April in the current fiscal year, records show.

That dynamic also is nationwide, Wexler said: Recruiting is improving at the same time that retirements and resignations are slowing.

Still, Wexler praised the data out of Houston specifically, saying the officer headcount is the best in 25 years.

"They're doing something right," he said.

Even before the positive numbers and the raises, data showed HPD had a comparable number of officers per capita to most of its peer cities. Houston's rate of 2.23 officers per 1,000 residents was above the median rate among big U.S. cities in 2019, according to the most recent FBI data available.

New York, Chicago and Philadelphia all had far more police, but Houston trailed only Los Angeles and Dallas among southern and western cities with more than a million residents. No other Texas city had a rate higher than 1.83.

Jaison Oliver, a Houston community organizer who has scrutinized HPD spending, said residents aren't getting a good return for the money being invested in the police department. City leaders never discuss public safety outcomes, he said.

"We only ever talk about increasing staffing," he said. "We never have any idea what we're getting for it."

The factors driving recruiting

Experts suggested several factors that could be driving the widespread improvement in police recruiting.

The job market has deteriorated and college-educated workers are worried about the rise of artificial intelligence, which could make a career in law enforcement more appealing, said Marc Levin, the Houston-based chief policy counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice.

Levin added public opinions about police may have improved since 2020, when a Minneapolis officer murdered George Floyd, sparking widespread protests, calls for reform and a "defund the police" movement.

"One trend that we saw coming out of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd was more and more officers either retiring or moving laterally from urban police departments to suburban, exurban, and rural departments," Levin said. "Some critics of police reform argue that officers in urban departments did not feel sufficiently supported, though this is difficult to prove."

Some experts, however, cautioned recent gains haven't erased the recruiting struggles departments faced during the coronavirus pandemic.

"The gains themselves appear to be relatively modest following pretty large drops between 2019 and 2022/2023," Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based criminologist, wrote in April.

Scott Mourtgos, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, agreed.

"Even though hiring has started to uptick again in large agencies, I suspect that many of them are still not at full staffing, seeing as the deficits they were starting at were so large," he said.

Wexler also noted that Houston's increase in officers comes as HPD reported an "unfortunate" drop in civilian staffing, from 985 as of March 2025 to 668 this year, records show.

Scores of HPD civilian staff were eligible for a retirement package Whitmire offered tenured city staff last year in a bid to cut spending, and many took it.

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