Police academy enrollment rises despite negative events in Ferguson, New York City

There has been a surge of applicants to police academies around the country, even as law enforcement has come under fire over the high-profile deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, New York and elsewhere.

In Michigan, enrollment is “skyrocketing,” said Richard Tillman, the director of basic training at the Oakland police academy.

In Ferguson, about 1,000 people applied for a vacant dispatcher’s job and more than 50 applied for two vacant patrol officer positions, a number that pleased the city’s mayor.

In New York City, recruitment levels have remained relatively consistent according to municipal data, and Iowa’s state police department is expecting its biggest class in a decade.

“We went for quite a few years with low enrollment, and within the last year our enrollment has really skyrocketed,” Mr. Tillman said about the Oakland academy. “I would think that with all the negativity that’s been going on that it would impact our enrollment numbers. I can’t explain it.”

Enrollment numbers will vary across the country, said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, because statistics are reported by each city and not nationally.

However, officials interviewed by The Washington Times said that either their recruiting numbers are going up or have remained constant — apparently unaffected by the controversies of the past year.

Police forces were heavily scrutinized after a series of high-profile confrontations that left some communities distrustful of officers. In July, black New York City resident Eric Garner died after he was put into a chokehold by Officer Daniel Pantaleo. In August, Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot black teenager Michael Brown during an altercation. The officers in both cases are white.

Grand juries decided not to indict either officer, setting off large protests in cities across the country and sparking debates over the use of force by police and law enforcement’s relationship with minorities.

It also prompted President Obama to launch his Task Force on 21st Century Policing, charged with interviewing police, community leaders and advocates across the country and coming up with ways to improve trust and cooperation.

But even in Ferguson — at the epicenter of much of the controversy — people are still interested in law enforcement jobs.

“Considering the number of people interested right now, I’m sure we’ll find outstanding applicants to be new officers here in Ferguson,” said Mayor James Knowles. One of those new officers is likely to be filling the position left vacant by Officer Wilson after he chose to leave the squad.

But in addition to increasing numbers, some police departments — Ferguson included — have been criticized for not recruiting officers from minority communities.

At the time of Officer Wilson’s confrontation with Brown, three out of roughly 50 officers in the Ferguson Police Department were black. The city population, however, is more than 60 percent black.

It is unknown how many of Ferguson’s new recruits are minorities, as reporters’ calls to the local police department were forwarded to a full answering machine.

Police Chief Sam Dotson of nearby St. Louis told The Washington Times that recruitment of minorities has remained consistent with what he saw before the Ferguson incident.

Out of 37 people in the training class that started in October, 17 were white, 18 were black, one was Hispanic and one was Asian, he said. The class set to begin in March has roughly the same breakdown by race, he said.

In New York City, the site of the incident that left Garner dead, recruitment levels have remained relatively consistent, according to data provided by the police department.

In a January class of nearly 900 recruits — the only group that has started training since the altercations — whites made up about 54 percent of the class, Hispanics 25 percent, blacks 11 percent and Asians 10 percent.

That is comparable to past years, said New York Police Lt. John Grimpel. The class that started in July had 925 people — about 56 percent white, 24 percent Hispanic, 11 percent black and 9 percent Asian.

In the District of Columbia, Lt. Sean Conboy said the Metropolitan Police Department has seen no noticeable change in applications for police positions and academy training.

“Though we are one of the most diverse departments in the United States, we continue to strive for an ethnically diverse agency representative of the communities we serve here in the District of Columbia,” Lt. Conboy said.

Sgt. Greg Lyon of Atlanta also told The Times that the Ferguson and New York controversies have “not had a noticeable impact” on recruitment numbers at the city’s academies.

Arlen Ciechanowski, director of the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, said increases in law enforcement budgets may be helping to bolster interest in a career in law enforcement despite the negative wave of publicity.

“We’ve been in somewhat austere times budgetarywise across the state and, indeed, the country,” he said. “I think maybe departments were holding back on filling positions. Times are a little better right now, budgets are up a little bit, the economy is up a little bit.”

The Iowa academy, responsible for training the majority of the state’s 6,000 law enforcement officers, will have one of its biggest classes in 10 years, he said. But Mr. Ciechanowski cautioned that it might be too early to discern any effect the Brown and Garner cases could have.

“There’s some lag time there,” Mr. Ciechanowski said. “Obviously, those incidents just occurred here in the last few months, and the people who are in the academy now may have committed before those things happened.”

Robert Snyder, an American studies professor at Rutgers University, said it’s reasonable to assume that some departments may have trouble attracting officers.

“When relations between the community and police department got strained, it became harder to convince guys in the neighborhood to become police officers,” said Mr. Snyder, who also authored “Crossing Broadway,” a book looking at community and police relations in New York City.