Five HSS demonstration sites, chosen through a competitive process, are analyzed in order to highlight how sites involved citizens in substantive ways to create new recruiting methods and marketing initiatives with the goal of attracting recruits who would make good community police officers. The five sites span the range of law enforcement in terms of size of department, rural versus urban location, and types of community crime problems; sites are: Sacramento Police Department, Burlington Police Department, Hillsborough Country Sheriff's Office, Detroit Police Department, and King County Sheriff's Office. The accomplishments and challenges at each site are described and the commonalities across the demonstration projects are analyzed. Among the commonalities across the five sites was the integral nature of the steering or advisory committees to project activities and to providing multidisciplinary feedback throughout the life of the project. Another commonality involved the use of focus groups to engage community support and vision. Lessons learned from the projects are enumerated and include the observation that involving the community in recruitment and hiring strategies is not always easy and that the process of identifying service-oriented traits that can be agreed on by all stakeholders can be a complex process. Best practices emerging out of the demonstration project experiences are presented and fall under the topics of marketing, community policing recruit characteristics, and service-oriented selection procedures. An historical overview of law enforcement selection procedures is presented and the objectives of the HSS strategy as a major change effort in policing paradigms are considered. Among the major HSS objectives are to develop an agency brand or image, revise occupational and psychological screenings, and institutionalize a range of new hiring practices that reflect the policing paradigm shift. Tables, references, appendixes
Innovations in Police Recruitment and Hiring: Hiring in the Spirit of Service
NCJ Number
212981
Date Published
January 2006
Length
160 pages
Annotation
This report presents findings from the Hiring in the Spirit of Service (HSS) project, a federally funded project that engages the community in recruiting and hiring service-oriented law enforcement personnel.
Abstract