Although the primary purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between education hiring requirements and police department diversity and community-police reflectivity, several other predictors of hiring emerged.  Notably, several expected predictors – such as officer pay and recruiting bonuses – had no impact on hiring.  Considered together, the data suggest police hiring is more the result of a police department’s organizational culture than any other factor.

Brief Overview of Methods

Police recruitment and retention is influenced by a wide array of factors, including not just agency hiring policies but also labor markets and competing employment sectors, unionization and collective bargaining agreements, regional variation in community sociodemographics and educational attainment, the nature of the police hiring process and agency turnover, rates of residential population change, and police officer pay, among others. ¹³  To account for this, a unique dataset was created that combined data from a number of sources for the period from 2000 to 2020.  The principal variables are drawn from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program.

Police departments’ education hiring requirements were categorized into one of four categories: (1) no formal requirement, or a high school diploma; (2) some college hours required, but no degree requirement; (3) associate degree required, or (4) bachelor’s degree required.

A statistical technique known as a Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) regression was employed.  This method enabled an analysis of the relationships between education hiring requirements and various aspects of police department demographics using the LEMAS, ACS, and OEWS data.  Much greater detail on the methodology is available in the full study, which is available through Georgia State University and currently undergoing peer review for an academic journal.

Brief Overview of Related Literature

For this study, a comprehensive literature review was conducted that considered representative bureaucracy, visible diversity in police agencies, measurements of organizational diversity, expected and actual outcomes of higher education hiring requirements for police officers, rates of degree earning, and the impacts of other community, organizational, and procedural factors on policing.

In summary, the literature widely agrees diversity matters in government, and policing is the most visible element of government.  Furthermore, including women and minorities in police agencies has identifiable benefits to the organizations and to communities.  Separately, there is compelling evidence to suggest college education has a measurable impact on police officer performance, although a number of studies are in conflict. For example, some studies show no relationship between a bachelor’s degree and use of force;¹⁴ while others find college-educated officers might arrest more minorities than their lesser-educated counterparts.¹⁵  Nevertheless, it is upon this evidence that college education hiring requirements are largely based.  However, significant variation in rates of degree earning and college attendance by sex and race creates the probability these requirements have a disparate impact on specific groups.  This limits agencies’ ability to hire from labor pools already constrained by prospective employee interest and suitability, wages, hiring, retention, and turnover, and other factors.

These conflicting findings further confirmed the need for a study that examines the influence of education hiring requirements on police department demographics.

Core Findings

Departments with higher education requirements did not appear to struggle in hiring female officers.  In fact, agencies that require bachelor’s degrees are statistically more likely to hire female officers than other agencies.  Similarly, agencies that required “some college” employed more Black officers than agencies that required only a high school diploma.  Finally, it was determined agencies requiring bachelor’s degrees had slightly better parity between the number of female officers and the number of female community members; and degree requirements had no impact on community-police reflectivity of Black officers.  Perhaps notably, the data showed as the count of Black residents increases, so does the count of Black officers; but this is not always true for female officers.

Separate from the initial inquiries into the impact of education requirements, analysis also revealed several other factors in a police agency that likely matter more to hiring.  For example, the best predictor of future female officers is the count of current female officers.  This suggests both that visible diversity in a police department attracts future diversity (i.e.: when an applicant can see herself represented in the police department, she is more likely to apply there), and this momentum compounds over time.  Similarly, the count of female officers was higher in agencies where there was, or where there had previously been, a female police chief.  Because data on the race of police chiefs has only been collected in two cycles of LEMAS, conclusions on the race of a police chief could not be assessed.  Separately, accreditation programs and tuition reimbursement programs had a modest effect attracting female and Black officers.  These programs also appeared to have modest correlation with officer retention.

Implications and Practical Application

The initial implications of the research are that increasing education hiring requirements does not adversely impact female or Black officer candidates, and in some cases they may increase minority representation.  Considered together, however, the findings suggest degree requirements themselves are not the root cause.  Rather, degree requirements are emblematic of other police department and community characteristics – such as community political and economic conditions – and those characteristics are more likely responsible for the variations in hiring and retention. While the study was limited to female and Black officers, it seems likely that these agency and community characteristics very likely influence hiring and retention more broadly.

Another important finding of the study is police officer salary, when considered within more than 20 model specifications, is never a significant predictor of hiring.  Specifically, although agencies that require bachelor’s degrees had slightly higher average salaries and significantly higher starting salaries than other agencies in the study, neither starting nor average salaries affected vacancy rates or staffing parity.  This finding could be synthesized as, “money is not the problem in police recruiting,” or, at least, salary alone is not the driving factor behind either recruitment or retention of police.  This finding is consistent with a review of the 2020 LEMAS data for another forthcoming article, which shows no effect of hiring bonuses on recruitment or retention.  Instead, it demonstrates non-financial factors are more likely to impact candidate self-selection into police recruiting processes.

Conclusion

Politicians, advocates, membership associations, scholars, and policing leaders have reached varying conclusions and proffered differing policies and solutions for police recruiting and requiring, few of which have been data informed.  By contrast, the study exposes wealth of empirical evidence about the nature of police recruiting broadly and impacts on female and Black officers specifically.  The study shows a combination of educational requirements, leadership, and economic conditions significantly influence the count of female and Black officers in police departments. Variation in officer demographics over time suggests diversity in policing is shaped both by internal policies and external societal trends and events.  The analysis of labor rates and community characteristics demonstrates the impactful role economic conditions play in shaping the gender composition of police departments.  Also, economically disadvantaged communities may face additional barriers to recruiting and retaining female officers.  Within agencies themselves, internal dynamics – rather than external ones – are significant determinants of diversity and, probably, recruiting and retention.  And although educational requirements appear to promote gender diversity, this is largely impacted by economic conditions, effective organizational management, and community context.

For policy makers and policing leaders, these findings offer valuable insights into the factors most effective in increasing count of underrepresented officers, and they offer perspective on the community contexts within and from which police departments are constructed.  These offer practical implications for policy and practice, as they suggest that departments should consider both agency factors, like higher educational standards, competitive and fair wages, and increased staffing rates; and they implicate the need for targeted recruiting and retention interventions that consider broad community contexts.