Oregon’s police training agency is one step closer to adding two more training classes to handle a hiring surge among law enforcement agencies statewide. The need to get new police officers trained is outpacing what the state can do.
A group of state lawmakers approved more money Wednesday to add two training classes at the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training with a final vote expected Friday. The agency anticipates getting approval.
Two extra classes would cover training for 80 new officers and deputies statewide. State law mandates that every new hire goes to Salem for this training.
The interim director of DPSST said, once approved, the agency will have a training class scheduled to begin every month starting in January and going through June. Even with the added classes, people hired today will still have to wait until May or June to start—well past when state law requires their training to start.
“Statutorily, when a new police officer is hired into an agency, they're supposed to be scheduled to attend a class within 90 days to start their basic police training,” DPSST interim director Brian Henson said. “Due to the hiring bubble that's taken place right now across the state, the large influx of new hires has caused that 90-day window to bump out to 180 days.”
The law is waived in cases where the delay is due to capacity with the state’s training program.
These two extra classes are in addition to two others that lawmakers had already proved earlier this year. However, the bottleneck to get into training still exists.
“Even by adding those four additional classes, we still have not been able to pull that, that window back to the 90-day timeframe. This is the largest bubble that we've ever experienced, at least in my 20 years with the agency,” Henson said.
At its core – this impacts how quickly police officers hired where you live – are on the streets and actually working. In Portland, where the agency has 63 new hires and nearly 80 more vacancies, it’s a big concern.
As of this week, 221 new hires are in the pipeline. The additional classes would give the state capacity to start training 280 new hires through June.
Officers scheduled to start training already include 40 for Portland, nine for Beaverton, seven for the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, five for Gresham, five for the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, four for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, and three for Salem.
Henson said the agency cannot add more training academies because they don’t have enough instructors to do so. He also said the training facility in Salem is designed around a 40-person class; all the classrooms, the gun range, and other training situations are built around that.
At least now, offering satellite training academies is not an option, and once again, it’s due to the instructor issue and state laws that mandate law enforcement training in Salem by state-certified instructors – of which there is a finite number.
Henson said they will keep looking at solutions like finding space for bigger classes and adding instructors. It would be up to state lawmakers to allow police agencies to run their own training, so in the meantime, the bottleneck continues.