There are times when Northampton Police Chief Jody Kasper feels like an athletic recruiter.
Nearly 50 officers have left her 60-member police force in the last five years, some to retirement following lengthy careers, some who realized early on they didn’t want the job, some to other departments, and some to budget cuts.
But in an increasingly competitive labor market, filling the empty positions from a shrinking pool of candidates is a continuous uphill battle that has left the Northampton Police Department understaffed to the tune of about eight officers each month.
Last year, the department received about 600 calls for help for which there was no patrol officer immediately available to respond, Kasper said. To meet minimum staffing standards, officers are routinely required to work overtime after their shift has ended.
“We are asking your city workers to come into work and work 16-hour shifts regularly,” Kasper told Northampton city councilors at a meeting in late May. “They’re in a car making critical decisions that will be quickly judged if they make an error and they’ve been awake for 20 hours. This is not reasonable for them.”
The depleted staff and required overtime that results have also cost the city financially.
Over the second half of last year, the Northampton Police Department required officers to collectively work more than 400 hours a month, on average, in compulsory overtime — simply to meet minimum coverage.
For each of those overtime hours, police officers are paid one-and-a-half times their salary. Northampton is effectively paying an extra 50% to fill shifts that officers would work at their normal salaries if the department were fully staffed, Kasper said.
But the chief said she also worries that extensive forced overtime leaves the police force burnt-out and exhausted — a recipe for unsafe work, liability for the department and city, and poor staff retention.
There were times earlier in her career, far into an extended shift, when Kasper dozed off at the wheel and quickly jolted awake, she said in an interview. It is not an experience unique to her.
“Exhaustion is difficult to manage and when you’re responding to calls, it’s not a good situation to be in,” Kasper said. “Decision-making is very hard when you’re dealing with extreme fatigue.”
Police staffing an issue nationwide
The staffing struggles afflicting the Northampton Police Department are not singular to Northampton. Nationally, police departments report trouble recruiting and retaining members.
Police resignations reached a two-decade high in New York last year. Washington, D.C.’s police staffing sunk to a half-century low, and is expected to fall further. Across the country, there is an exodus of officers from the profession.
“No one wants to be a cop these days,” Attleboro Police Chief Kyle Heagney assessed last year.
Among the reasons typically cited by police officials is the increased scrutiny, and sometimes hostility, cops now face, particularly since the 2020 murder of George Floyd and other high-profile cases of police misconduct.
The Northampton police department is not the only city agency with difficulty filling out its staff. But police issues have drawn intense focus from the Northampton public in recent years.
It was Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer that set off the city’s own impassioned conversation around policing.
Three years ago, thousands of protestors filled the streets of downtown Northampton in reaction to Floyd’s killing, mirroring demonstrations that occurred across the country. City council meetings in the weeks after sometimes stretched past midnight as hundreds of members of the public advocated for police reform, and as councilors weighed drastic cuts to the police department’s funding.
About a month after Floyd’s death, the Northampton city council sliced the police department’s budget by 10% — a $669,957 drop in funding, the majority of it designated for payroll.
Three officers were laid off and one vacant position was left unfilled. Another officer resigned, and his position was also kept empty to balance the budget, Kasper said a week after the funding cut.
In the months that followed, another five police officers resigned and 11 asked for transfers to other departments, she later said.
“Some officers didn’t want to work for a community where they didn’t feel valued,” Kasper said in an interview. But by now, those who wanted to leave because of the budget cuts have done so, she said.
In the five-year span from 2003 through 2007, about 15 officers left the Northampton Police Department for various reasons. That number climbed steadily over the next decade but spiked in the last five years.
Between 2018 and 2022, 49 officers left the department.
The largest group departed for jobs at other police departments or law enforcement agencies. Each year, Kasper said, one or two officers tend to join the Massachusetts State Police. But in recent years, more officers left for departments in nearby communities.
The trend is settling, Kasper said. In the first five months of this year, six officers have left the Northampton Police. Three retired, two went to the state police and one quit during field training.
“That’s different than years past and that’s great,” Kasper said. “We definitely see it trending in the right direction as we recover from defunding and we hope that continues and that we hope we have a little bit of stability back.”
Ways to attract police recruits
Still, filling the open positions proves arduous.
In 2015, the Northampton Police Department received more than 150 job applications. Last year, the department received 56. More than a third weren’t even eligible for the job, some because they did not at least hold an associate’s degree, which Northampton requires. Others were disqualified for issues in their past, and the pool of applicants narrowed further.
“Every conference I go to, everything I read about policing across the country, this is where we are,” Kasper told city councilors at a meeting in late May. “We’re in a really tricky spot with a lot of people leaving the field.”
She said at least one local police department has tried offering hiring bonuses for new recruits, a practice more typically seen in big cities.
Kasper has taken a different approach.
A new department policy provides a bonus to an officer who recruits a candidate who makes it through their field training. This past week, in the mayor’s budget for the coming fiscal year, Kasper also asked the city council to fund three new positions for the police department.
The three “student officer” positions will allow the department to bring on additional recruits earlier than it is currently able.
The Holyoke Police Academy, where prospective Northampton officers attend, runs once or twice each year, Kasper said.
As of now, if a Northampton officer is retiring in May, but the police academy welcomes a new class in April, Kasper cannot hire someone for the job and send them to the academy. She must wait to do so until the officer’s position opens up.
The next session of the police academy may not be for months later. In the meantime, the departing officer’s position remains unfilled.
The new student officer positions, Kasper said, will allow her to hire new recruits and send them to the academy once she knows an officer intends to leave their job.
The new officer will still need to complete the six-month academy and four months of field training before they are prepared for the job. But the time a position stays empty may be months less — meaning fewer months of forced overtime and fewer officers required to work shifts as long as 16 hours.
Northampton currently has four officers in the police academy. If Kasper had the student officer positions available, she said she would have sent three more.
Creating the student officer positions, she said, “is just good planning.”
“When you have people leaving, having that pipeline of new staff ready to go is really important,” City Council President James Nash said in a phone call last week.
He spoke Thursday night in defense of the police department, calling the department “thoughtful” and “terrific,” and pushing back against the hesitations of some colleagues to add positions to the police budget.
The city council ultimately approved the mayor’s general fund budget, with the three student officer positions included, by a vote of 7-2. Councilors Rachel Maiore and Jamila Gore voted no.
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