The Nation's Police Chiefs are Pessimistic About Policing in the Post-George Floyd Era

A new survey of police chiefs shows they're facing staffing problems and beleaguerment.

Photo by Roman Koester on Unsplash

The murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin could have been a uniting moment for the country — from coast to coast, Americans could’ve committed themselves to a path of reform that had deep bipartisan backing.

After all, even conservative talking heads like Rush Limbaugh initially found themselves sympathetic to Floyd and angry at Chauvin’s conduct.

In a discussion on “The Breakfast Club,” Limbaugh said that “it sickens me what happened to” Floyd. He also called for first-degree murder charges against Chauvin, which is tougher sentencing than he eventually got.

But the rioting that marked much of the Summer of 2020 ended up quickly dividing America — as did the resulting spike in violent crime, particularly shootings and homicides. Red America and Blue America quickly retreated into their own camps, and bipartisan progress on criminal justice and police reform slowed.

One of the institutions most impacted by the post-2020 environment was policing. I spent much of 2022 and 2023 reporting about staffing shortages that had emerged at many police departments following the Summer of 2020.

What I heard time and time again is that police departments were having trouble both retaining staff and recruiting new staff because so many police officers didn’t want to be part of a profession that was being publicly demonized. Many officers felt like they were being treated as if they were Derek Chauvin — even if they had never done anything wrong in the line of duty.

A new study published in Policing: An International Journal offers some broader data to accompany what I heard speaking to police across the country the past few years.

Brandon del Pozo, a former police chief who today works as an academic at Brown University, worked with colleagues to administer a broad national survey of the nation’s police chiefs. They focused on chiefs at municipal departments — so no sheriff’s departments, university police, or park police. Data was collected up through 2022.

His team asked the chiefs about everything from the morale of their officers to whether their departments feel like proactive policing has been hindered in the current environment.

The results revealed a decidedly pessimistic mood among police chiefs.

“The big standout was police consistently said they were having a hard time recruiting qualified applicants. It was much, much harder than it was before George Floyd,” Del Pozo told me, noting that while this was a consistent finding all over the country, it was more common in the Northeast than the South.

In all, 83.6% of respondents said that it had become more difficult to recruit well-qualified officers following the murder of George Floyd.

And a clear majority of respondents agreed with the statement that “these days, officers feel proactive policing carries risks to their career that encourage them not to take action.”

That last sentiment may relate to why we saw such a decrease in some forms of policing following Floyd’s murder. To take one example, look at traffic stops.

“By the end of 2023, the police in Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they did pre-pandemic,” the New York Times noted in a reported piece earlier this year.

Meanwhile, a whopping 80% of police chiefs surveyed said that they “felt events beyond their control affected people’s attitudes toward police.” (But 90% of chiefs felt that support for police in their own community either stayed the same or had even improved.)

But is it possible that this pessimistic mood is starting to lift? Del Pozo’s data is drawn through 2022, when many departments were still reeling from the events of Summer 2020. There’s some data suggesting that police hiring started to improve in 2023, and it’s possible that morale has improved in that time frame as well.

Del Pozo offered some reasons for optimism.

“I think that policing is a resilient profession. We’ve seen despite defunding efforts, abolish efforts, despite different presidential administration, just historically policing over the last few decades has been resilient,” he noted.

But for jurisdictions where police departments continue to struggle with staffing issues and whose morale issues may lead to less effective policing, that change may come slowly.

“It doesn’t change overnight, especially in big cities that bore the brunt of social unrest and protest I think there’s still a sense of beleaguerment,” he cautioned.