GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – The Green Bay Police Department added five more officers on Monday.
Leadership says it’s an encouraging sign, considering that they’ve recently seen classes of around three officers be sworn-in, but they still would like to generate more interest in joining the police force.
“We’re definitely hiring, but again, we’re not going to change our standards,” says Green Bay Police Chief Andrew Smith. “We only want the top quality people.”
Chief Smith says, unfortunately, the “now hiring” sign is hanging outside most police departments throughout the area with heightened urgency.
For context, the downward trend of applicants locally is in the hundreds, not dozens.
“Just a number of years ago, we’d give a test and six-hundred people would apply,” explains Chief Smith. “Now we give a test, just last week, and we get probably twenty.”
Law enforcement officials have theorized a number of factors that could potentially be driving the exodus of police applicants.
First, officials have noticed more and more people opt for a career in the private sector, citing that the economy has bounced back and there’s considerable money to be made in a number of fields.
Additionally, the lure of becoming a police officer has also changed, according to those in the field.
“The thing is after Ferguson, [Missouri,] and some other incidents, policing lost a little of its luster,” says Chief Smith.
Yet the five newest officers in the force, who come from all over Eastern Wisconsin, have gone thru years of training to get to this point.
After reciting their oaths on Monday, they still have another few weeks of training before they actually start the job in earnest.
It turns out that the process of learning a few new names and seeing fresh faces around the office isn’t anything new for the department.
“Since I’ve been here, only three years, we’ve hired forty-seven new people,” says Chief Smith. “Forty-seven new officers out of one-hundred and seventy-seven.”
Chief Smith adds that their maximum staff capacity is one-hundred and eighty, which puts them only three shy of that mark.
His concern is that there’s a considerable number of thirty-something year veterans on the force, which are set to retire soon, and they want to ensure that there’s enough applicants to fill those spots.
While there may be concerns about overall interest, the number of female applicants has never been higher, according to Chief Smith.
Of the five total officers that took the oath on Monday, two of them were women.
“We have thirty female officers in our department, which is the most we’ve ever had in the history of the Green Bay Police Department,” he explains. “And well above the national average for women represented.”
