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01/19/2021 02:18 PMRecruitment efforts by police are down drastically since the summer, both in Guilford and across the state, with an almost 90 percent drop in applicants locally and the Guilford Police Department (GPD) only able to fill one position in a recent recruiting push, according to Sergeant Martina Jakober.
Jakober told the Courier that in years past, the recruitment service that GPD uses and shares with other nearby departments has garnered close to 800 applicants. Just recently, they had to choose from a pool of just 82, with only one candidate meeting the “high standards” of GPD despite a hope by the department to add multiple positions.
The New Haven Police Department only received 120 applicants, according to Jakober. That department employs 10 times the number of officers that GPD does.
Twenty-seven departments across the state are currently hiring new officers, according to PoliceApp, the service GPD uses.
Jakober told the Courier that while it would be impossible to identify a single factor in this dramatic decrease, which is happening against the backdrop of a pandemic, public perception of policing and media coverage, along with some of the changes introduced in the police accountability signed by Governor Ned Lamont in July, likely contributed to the dearth of applications.
“Just personally speaking, I think that’s a huge part of what is kind of scaring people away from this profession,” Jakober said. “You’re trained and you’re told to do a job in a certain way, and sometimes it gets represented in the media in an opposite way...and it was a whole other angle that actually showed you what happened, but everybody has already rushed to judgment.”
The police accountability law did some things to chip away at “qualified immunity,” a legal doctrine that shields officers from individual liability when on the job. Officers can now be held legally responsible for on-duty violations of civil rights if a court finds their actions were “malicious, wanton, or wilful.”
Jakober also posited that other aspects of the new law, specifically one stipulation that allows the revocation of an officer’s certification for “conduct undermining public confidence in law enforcement,” are broad and vague enough to make potential recruits fear that they will be fired for less than serious mistakes.
“You don’t really have a voice,” she said. Police officers “don’t have that reputation anymore.”
The Police Officers Standards and Training Council (POSTC) clarified that particular language in October, setting out much more specific behaviors that could cause an officer to be decertified, including overt acts of bigotry and racism, falsifying reports or evidence, and failing to intervene when another officer is using excessive force. All decertification reviews must also originate with a local law enforcement agency’s leader; a member of the public cannot report a police officer to POSTC directly for these violations.
But Jakober said she thought public perception and media coverage could still propel these investigations, and the threat of being “vilified” certainly could scare off potential recruits.
Jakober also made it clear she supported many of the aspects of the accountability bill intended to address these things that “should have been in place all along” and were mostly already in place at the GPD.
Both national and local activists have repeatedly pointed out systemic problems in policing that include widespread racial disparities in arrests and use of force, as well as cover-ups and stonewalling after deadly blunders. Others have suggested a rethinking of policing altogether, decrying some of the fundamental principles around highly funded departments who often are accountable only to themselves and escape consequences for widespread failure or corruption.
The kind of misconduct that has been revealed across the country is likely a factor as well in the lower recruitment numbers, Jakober said, with potential recruits doubting that they will have colleagues and superiors who are serving honorably or with the best interests of the community in mind.
“I do believe people have seen things that make them think that’s the norm in law enforcement,” she said.
While emphasizing that misconduct is real, it is putting those “outlier” incidents “front and center” that drives people away from the profession, Jakober posited. She also cited the very visible abuse and mistreatment of law enforcement in Washington D.C. as something that will likely discourage recruits, after extremists storming the capitol building in an apparent coup attempt on Jan. 6 killed at least one police officer and injured dozens of others.
Jakober said she has a good friend who works for the Capital Police, and had spoken to him about the experience responding to the insurrectionists, which he described as “nuts.”
“It’s very scary, the reality of what policing is now,” she said.
Protests in Portland, Oregon, and other cities where departments were “unprepared” to protect their officers in the face of attacks also could undermine confidence in policing, Jakober said.
In Connecticut, the ramifications of the accountability bill stretch further than just public perception and legal liability. Jakober said she has had to pay about $100 more a month for an umbrella insurance policy following the passing of the bill, adding that many insurance companies have stopped providing policies for officers altogether.
Though not directly related to perceptions of police or the bill, Jakober said a lack of pension was also something likely driving officers away, citing it as a factor in recent departures from the GPD.
“The agencies that seem to be getting the most applicants are the ones that are still having a pension or having some sort of long term goal to retain the officers,” Jakober said.
Some officers start in Guilford with a 401k-type plan, she said, and after spending the minimum time there, move on to other departments that offer a pension as a more attractive long-term option.
“They get really good training here, they get really good benefits, and then they go off to another agency that has a pension,” she said.
Despite all this, Jakober, who has been with the GPD for 17 years, said she is still enthusiastic and happy as a police officer
“I love my job, I love being a police officer. I love the community policing aspect of the job that I do,” Jakober said.
But at the same time, she said it is difficult for her and her husband, also a police officer, to encourage their children to follow in their parents’ footsteps.
“They’ve all talked about wanting to be police officers, and we keep telling them, ‘be firemen,’” she said