Still wearing his civilian clothes, Lompoc Police Chief Joseph Mariani explains that he hasn’t yet had time to put on his uniform. His busy morning followed a late night, during which he oversaw a gang sweep throughout the city that resulted in the arrest of 11 people.
The city didn’t carry out the operation solo. Lompoc police officers had help from local and state agencies, welcome assistance for an understaffed and overworked department that’s been busy trying to get a handle on an uptick in violent crimes plaguing Lompoc. Seven homicides have taken place in the city of roughly 44,000 people this year.
Exasperated, Mariani says he’s preparing for another late night. Half joking, he quips that he may be able to sleep after the department hires more officers. But so far, they’ve been hard to find.
Although his department may be feeling it more than other law enforcement agencies in Santa Barbara County, Mariani isn’t the only police chief facing this challenge. Police departments across the country are struggling to fill police officer positions.
“We’re no different than many other smaller agencies … there’s a lack of interest in the police profession nationwide,” Mariani says.
This issue is the basis for a report the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) released in September titled “The Workforce Crisis, and What Police Agencies Are Doing About It.” According to this document, fewer people are applying to become police officers throughout the country and more people are leaving the profession earlier than in previous years.
“Approximately 63 percent of respondents to PERF’s survey said that the number of applicants applying for full-time sworn positions at their agency has either ‘decreased significantly’ (36 percent) or ‘decreased slightly’ (27 percent) compared to five years ago,” the report states.
According to PERF’s report, there are various factors contributing to this decline. The U.S. economy is doing well and unemployment is low, which means there are not a lot of people looking for jobs. The increasing number of videos circulating online depicting questionable police conduct have added to a negative perception of police work that could be deterring people from seeking careers in law enforcement.
In Lompoc, these nationwide issues are amplified by the department’s local challenge of having to compete with other agencies in the county that pay more and offer better financial incentives, such as signing bonuses.
“It’s got a dual impact on us,” Lompoc Mayor Jenelle Osborne said. “We already know that nationally there is difficulty attracting individuals into law enforcement … combined with a lack of funding to pay competitively, and it’s causing dual consternation and frustration for the community.”
This shortage is happening at a time when many local departments are attempting large-scale hiring efforts. The Santa Maria Police Department is trying to fill positions generated through new sales tax revenue. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office continues to look for custody deputies to staff a new jail opening. All departments need help, but some are finding those positions easier to fill than others.
Recruiting, retention challenges
Mariani has met his share of hiring challenges during his 35-year career in law enforcement. Prior to moving to Lompoc, he was the commanding officer for recruitment and employment with the Los Angeles Police Department. He helped orchestrate the agency’s recruitment drive that resulted in it hiring more than 1,000 officers in the late 2000s.
Lompoc’s situation is different, he said.
The city’s primary challenge is what it can pay compared to other agencies in the area, Mariani said. Aside from Guadalupe, the starting salary for police officers in every other department in the county is about 20 percent higher than in Lompoc.
The Lompoc City Council last gave its officers a raise in the 2017-19 budget in exchange for holding three police officer positions vacant. This moved the department closer to what others paid at the time, but since then, the gap has continued to widen,
Mariani said.
“[Other local] agencies have continued to offer raises and incentives. … Basically [the 2017] raises have been nullified by what’s around them competitively,” Mariani said.
When Mariani joined the Lompoc Police Department as a captain four years ago, it employed 51 officers. Four of those positions were lost when some grant funding ran out, taking the number down to 47. Excluding the three positions that are being held vacant in exchange for the 2017 raises, the department is funded for 44 positions, of which 37 are filled.
Mariani said of the 13 or 14 officers the department has hired since he arrived four years ago, only five remain with the department. Many have left for the Santa Maria Police Department or the county Sheriff’s Office. The department lost five officers between April and June this year, shortly after Mariani took over as chief in late February. Two officers retired, and three left for Santa Maria.
While the Lompoc Police Department is in the midst of a recruiting crisis, the Guadalupe Police Department is slowly recovering from one it suffered last year.
Almost two months after arriving in Guadalupe in October 2018, Police Chief Michael Cash lost almost 50 percent of his department. The agency is funded for 15 positions—although two are contracted to work at the Santa Maria Public Airport—but at the time only nine were filled. That number dropped even lower after four officers left for different departments and two others left because of injuries or illnesses.
With only Cash and three officers remaining, the department operated on two, two-person shifts: one during the day and one at night. More than a year later, the department is almost fully staffed, but Cash said retention is always a potential problem for the department.
As the lowest paid police department in Santa Barbara County, losing officers to other agencies isn’t uncommon, Cash said. Of the four officers who left last year, one went to Lompoc, one went to Arroyo Grande, and two went to Grover Beach.
Cash said he doesn’t view surrounding agencies as competition. But the PERF report discusses this issue of departments within a region competing for officers.
“As the applicant pool shrinks, police agencies compete with one another for well-qualified recruits,” the report states. “This is particularly true in areas where multiple agencies recruit from a single, regional police academy.”
This is the situation in Santa Barbara County where almost all recruits are trained at Allan Hancock College’s Law Enforcement Academy in Lompoc.
As the number of people applying to become police officers has decreased in recent years, the number of people enrolling in the academy has also declined. Law Enforcement Academy Coordinator Ken George said that about six or seven years ago, most classes—of which there are two a year—would start with about 40 recruits. The current class that ends in December began with 25 people.
David Whitham, director of public safety training at Allan Hancock College, attributes this decrease in recruits to the strong U.S. economy. Historically, he said, whenever the country’s economy is doing well and the unemployment rate is low, fewer people look for jobs in law enforcement. But once the economy starts to dip and the unemployment rate increases, more people will look to police work as a career path.
However, Whitham is less optimistic about how changes at the state level could affect recruiting in the future. Specifically he points to a law passed this summer, Assembly Bill 392, that will change the definition of when police officers can justify using deadly force. Under existing state law, this level of force is justifiable when it’s considered to be “reasonable.” When the new state law takes effect in January, this standard will change to “necessary.”
Whitham said law changes that place greater scrutiny on police officers could deter some people from seeking a career in law enforcement in the future.
“Now all of a sudden, where in an instance you made the best choice based on the circumstances, and I’m on trial now for a murder or assualt,” Whitham said. “That’s where people are probably going to step back and say, ‘I’m going to take a second look at this career, and this may not be for me.’”
Effects on the community
In the wake of an alleged gang-related shooting that killed 15-year-old Erik Villa Vargas in mid-October, more than 50 Lompoc residents spent their Friday night on Oct. 25 at the Dick DeWees Community and Senior Center discussing ways to address the city’s uptick in youth violence.
A common refrain repeated that night: The city needs more police officers.
As the meeting came to a close, Mariani, who sat attentively in the front row during the two-hour meeting, approached the front of the room and addressed the crowd. Yes, he said, the department needs more funding to hire additional police officers. But first, it needs to fill the positions that are already vacant.
That night, as during previous Lompoc City Council meetings and while talking with the Sun, Mariani has remained realistic about what the department can and can’t do with its existing staff level. The department has been forced to eliminate all of its specialty units and shift every officer to patrol and detective work.
“We don’t have a gang unit; we don’t have a traffic unit; we don’t have a narcotics unit,” Mariani said. “As a result, our patrol officers are generalists so they have to handle a myriad of issues.”
Mariani said it’s hard to pin down how much this officer shortage affects the city’s crime rate. But any time a department is forced to operate without specialized units, it’s harder to prevent certain types of crime, he said.
“The reality is you need to have selective enforcement to deal with emerging crime issues,” Mariani said. “It’s no mystery that we don’t have a gang or narcotic unit, so things are going to manifest themselves when you don’t have that kind of attention.”
Mariani acknowledges that hiring additional police officers isn’t a panacea for the city’s crime woes—additional programs and economic opportunities for younger residents are also needed—but, he said, his department needs to be a part of the solution.
“It pains me because I think [Lompoc residents] deserve more,” Mariani said. “And I want to deliver more for them, and so do the men and women that work [at the department].”
The department’s turnover rate also makes it difficult to establish connections within the community. This is a major concern for Mayor Osborne.
She said that although the department has a large cohort of experienced officers who have been there for years, it also somewhat serves as a training ground where younger officers—usually from out of the area—work for a short time before leaving for other agencies that pay more.
This reputation as a training ground is one Osborne wants to shed. The turnover hurts the department’s ability to maintain relationships with certain parts of the community where more crime takes place, she said.
“If officers are just here for two to five years and then leave on a regular basis, we’re losing out on … those relationships and understanding the culture of our community,” Osborne said.
In addition to losing out on those community relationships, this turnover means that everybody has to work more while understaffed. During the peak of the Guadalupe Police Department’s staffing crisis last year, Cash said he was concerned the department would have to cut back on its level of patrolling. To prevent the department from reaching that point, everybody had to work extra shifts until additional officers were hired.
Now the Lompoc Police Department is in the same situation, where its officers have to work more hours than its chief would like. Mariani said he’s concerned about the possibility of officers getting burnt out and leaving.
“You can only ask so much,” Mariani said. “I’m concerned folks are working above and beyond … but overtime is not really an option in many cases.”
Now hiring
Not all departments in the county feel like there’s a crisis. The Santa Maria Police Department has experienced lulls in hiring over the years, but it generally doesn’t have trouble filling positions, the department’s training and recruiting manager, Christina Alvarez, said.
This is good news for the department as it begins recruiting officers to fill positions available through Measure U, a sales tax increase voters approved last November that generates additional revenue for the city.
The department of about 130 officers has 10 positions open right now that Measure U is funding. Santa Maria has eight trainees in Allan Hancock College’s current Law Enforcement Academy class that will fill some of these positions after they graduate.
James Roach is one of these trainees. At 36 years old, he decided to make a career change and become a police officer after missing the structure the military provided him 10 years ago. As for why he chose to work for Santa Maria, he said, “because it’s home.”
Sometimes it’s that simple. Officers often choose to work for the department where they live, academy coordinator George said. But there are other factors that can entice recruits. Financial incentives can sway people, but the size of a department, the type of police work, and the career opportunities also matter.
In Santa Maria, given the size of the department, people who start off working patrol can move into a variety of specialized units in a short time.
“We want people to be here for 30 years,” Alvarez said. “If we can offer somebody a community services spot after being on patrol a couple of years, that’s an attraction our agency has that a lot don’t.”
Despite its recent success, Santa Maria is in the process of bolstering the use of social media in its recruitment process to reach younger applicants. This will be a first for the department, which traditionally has relied on newspaper advertisements and billboards in its recruitment drives, Alvarez said. She also said the department plans to use social media to increase transparency with the public.
During this recruitment drive, the Santa Maria Police Department is competing with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, which is hiring custody deputies to work at the North County Branch Jail. Construction of this facility, which is located west of Santa Maria, is supposed to wrap up by the end of this year. Since beginning the hiring process in February 2017, the department has hired 58 custody deputies, public information officer Raquel Zick said in an email.
These custody deputy positions have been easier to fill than sheriff’s deputy positions, primarily because the statewide hiring standards are different, Zick said. But given the size of the department with almost 400 sworn-in officers of various ranks, and the flexibility that comes with that, the agency generally doesn’t have a hard time filling positions.
“An advantage that an agency of our size has is that we can recruit for applicants to join our team and adjust where they will begin their career during the hiring process,” Zick said in an email.
Because smaller agencies, such as Guadalupe and Lompoc, can’t offer the same pay or opportunities larger agencies can, they have to find other ways to attract recruits.
Guadalupe Police Chief Cash said most of the officers in his department live in other cities. He believes if the city could create some sort of housing assistance program, it could help attract or retain officers. Lompoc City Council has kicked around a similar idea during past meetings.
Mayor Osborne is also looking into other solutions that wouldn’t require any investment from the city. She wants to expand the city’s mentorship or shadowing opportunities where interested people could learn more about jobs in law enforcement.
According to the PERF report, one of the most troubling aspects of this workforce crisis is that it could grow worse in the future. The document states that many departments have more personnel eligible for retirement now than five years ago.
Alvarez said this is the situation in Santa Maria and that the department has already started working with city management to plan for this exodus.
Lompoc is facing this same obstacle in not only law enforcement, but all city departments, Osborne said. But when that time comes, the police jobs will be the hardest to fill.
“The city as a whole is beginning to see the workers that have been part of our community for 25 to 30 years retiring and no one is choosing that career path, much less public safety,” Osborne said.
Reach Staff Writer Zac Ezzone at zezzone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 21-28, 2019.