Did the social justice protests of 2020 lead to a wave of police departures? A recent study suggests it may not be that simple.
In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by pinning him to the ground with his knee. As footage of the encounter circulated online, the image of a white police officer kneeling nonchalantly on a black man until he choked ignited a tinderbox: In the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans The shelter-in-place madness has taken to the streets to protest police brutality and sometimes violence.
Conventional wisdom holds that amid a nationwide surge in crime and escalating protests, with demonstrators claiming that “all cops are jerks,” many officers simply caved. American police departments are facing their own problems.
“The law enforcement community is suffering a year from the beginning of a global pandemic and now is seeing significant social unrest,” Police 1 Reported in October 2020. “In just a few months, officers went from being praised as essential workers to working within a social discourse that casts a negative light on all officers.”
A June 2021 survey by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found that there was a 45% increase in retirements and an 18% increase in resignations in 2020-2021 compared to the previous year.
But a new study by Duke University law professor Ben Grunwald casts doubt on that claim. To assess the validity of claims that police officers resigned en masse following the 2020 protests, Grunwald gathered “data on every job held by every officer in all 6,800 local law enforcement agencies in fifteen states.” Together, they cover half of the U.S. population. The database covers more than 972,000 police officers from the mid-1990s to 2022, although in this study, he only focused on 2011 to 2021.
Grunwald found that “the ‘increase in departures’ among these agencies after the summer of 2020 was smaller, later, less sudden, and may not be as widespread as retention crisis narratives suggest.”
“Attrition rates were nearly stable in 2020 compared with the previous year,” he wrote, while “2021 saw a historically large increase in attrition rates, but was well below the most widely reported numbers for the period.” Specific For example, turnover rates in 2020 “increased less than 1% compared to 2019,” while “the increase in 2021 is much greater, increasing by 18% compared to 2019.” Grunwald noted that while the increase was “historically unusual and larger than any biennium in the past decade,” it was also much smaller than indicated by the 2021 PERF study, which About one-third “can be explained in terms of preexplanation.”
“All in all, the cumulative impact on total employment by the end of 2021 is only 1%,” Grunwald concluded. “This is not due to increased lateral mobility. [officers transferring to another department or another role within law enforcement]As some people think. quite, [the database] showed that the vast majority of excess separations in 2021 were caused by officers leaving the field, at least for a period of time. [those with 500 or more officers] has been hit hard, losing more than 5% of its employees by the end of 2021.
As for why officers chose to leave, Grunwald acknowledged that he couldn’t test whether factors such as “social hostility” or criticism from city leaders made officers feel unsupported. But he did examine “whether the intensity of local protests affected local quarantines,” comparing police quarantine rates to reported attendance at more than 9,800 protests in the summer of 2020. The results provide no evidence that political activism leads to more dissociation among institutions with the highest protest intensity.
Instead, Grunwald proposed four possible alternatives to increasing officer turnover. “the first is Economy“, he wrote. “Like workers in other fields, officials quit for better pay, benefits, training, and advancement opportunities—especially in times of economic growth…The U.S. job market surged in the first half of 2021 , every month there was a 70% increase in vacancies by the end of the year. New York Times Published an article titled “Why the police quit in droves last year.” The article cites the Asheville Police Department as a microcosm of national trends, noting that officers feel increasingly “demoralized” but also noting that the starting salary of $37,000 is nowhere near enough to buy a home in the city.
Another potential factor Grunwald noted is the pandemic itself, with officers not only having to deal with “personal obligations like family or child care,” but also “burnout,” as “the pandemic amplifies old stressors and creates New sources of stress”.
Grunwald also said political activism may have contributed to the officer attrition, either due to demoralizing protests or pressure for reform, although “the timing is also consistent with the pandemic” and cannot be easily separated.
Finally, he thinks demographic changes may have played a role, as a large number of police officers who were approaching retirement age, either as part of the baby boomer generation or hired after the 1994 crime bill, may have taken the opportunity to move on and call it a day. . The Marshall Project reported in January 2023 that while some cities and counties have struggled to staff their police departments since 2020, these jurisdictions are also having trouble finding jobs as the overall job market rebounds. firefighters, bus drivers and other government workers.”
There are other reasonable explanations. John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University, noted that “a police officer’s annual pension payout is a function of their total earnings in their final years, not base salary, but salary plus overtime.” In Atlanta, officer overtime pay in 2020 Doubled; Chicago paid more than $177 million in overtime that year, a 27% increase from the previous year.
Grunwald’s results don’t allay all concerns about the current state of policing — for example, his data can’t address the question of whether officers “quietly quit” and stay on the job but put in minimal effort. But it does suggest that, despite recent fear-mongering, the 2020 protests likely did not result in police officers fleeing for the exits in droves.
