From the New York Times news section:
Departures of Police Officers Accelerated During a Year of Protests
Retirements nationwide were up by 45 percent and resignations by 18 percent in the 12-month period ending in April.
By Neil MacFarquhar
Published June 11, 2021… A survey of about 200 police departments indicates that retirements were up by 45 percent and resignations by 18 percent in the period between April 2020 and April 2021, when compared with the preceding 12 months. The percentage of officers who left tended to be larger for departments in big or medium-size cities
I.e., blacker cities.
, according to the Police Executive Research Forum
… Last year’s departures came against the backdrop of protests that erupted nationwide when George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, along with the police killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. The aggressive tactics some officers used against protesters often compounded the vitriol against the police.
In contrast, the looting and arson by protesters didn’t happen. Who are you going to believe: Tucker Carlson and hundreds of hours of video?
The future of policing was called into question, with demands to defund departments or to assign some of their tasks to civilian agencies. The coronavirus pandemic also took a toll, with cities slashing budgets and some officers deciding that risking their health through potential exposure to the virus was endangering their families. The pandemic also brought a surge in the most violent crimes.
But the surge in the most violent crimes had nothing to do with the the media declaring the racial reckoning.
The New York Times used the phrase “racial reckoning” eight times between 1851 and May 24, 2020, but 98 times since. On the other hand, it could have used it even more because the NYT substitutes the term “pandemic” as the cause of any bad things that the racial reckoning caused. That’s because the racial reckoning is a Good Thing and therefore cannot have caused any Bad Things.
… Cities where demonstrations were robust last year experienced substantial departures from their police forces.
In New York, 2,600 officers retired in 2020, according to police statistics, after 1,509 retirements the year before. In Portland, Ore., 69 officers resigned and 75 retired from April 2020 to April 2021, versus 27 and 14 the previous year. In Seattle, resignations increased to 123 from 34 and retirements to 96 from 43.
Seattle ended up with 150 fewer patrol officers than expected, and for months, only slightly more than half of the highest-priority 911 calls have drawn responses within the targeted time of seven minutes, according to police statistics.
Many cities are also finding it harder to attract recruits, with the number of new hires in Portland falling to 30 from 69, and in Seattle to 44 from 119.
After skipping any police training last year for budgetary reasons, St. Paul, Minn., received 178 applications this year, down about half from the 366 received in 2016, said Sgt. Natalie Davis, a police spokeswoman.
While the city is authorized to have 620 police officers, it has about 580 at the moment. That means the department has moved officers onto patrol duties from specialized units like those that track drugs, gangs and guns, Sergeant Davis said.
You know, tracking drugs, gangs, and guns sounds pretty … RACIST. Gun control laws put a lot of black men in prison, so they’ve got to go, or maybe just make it illegal for whites to have long guns, while the government could provide every black youth with a handgun on his 14th birthday, along with posters of his favorite rappers holding pistols sideways to keep the death toll down.
There is widespread consensus that another reason retention has suffered is that police officers are asked to do too much. In addition to confronting crime, they also deal with mental health problems, addiction and homelessness, as well as the occasional lost dog.
All these different tasks that police are asked to do really cuts down on their donut shop time.
