Advancing community policing through staffing: the role of recruitment signals

Purpose Police agencies face two related crises: police-community relations and staffing. While previous research has focused on how agencies may implement community-oriented policing through officers to improve police-community relations, it has not discussed how staffing tactics may help community-oriented policing. This research reviews both how staffing tactics can signal community-oriented policing to the community and how practitioners perceive the impact of these tactics on staffing levels, community-oriented policing, and other related dimensions. Design/methodology/approach This work draws on a broader research project that assessed perceptions of practitioners regarding 237 tactics for recruitment and selection of police officers. We identified the tactics from reviews of scholarly and gray literature as well as from news reports. We asked practitioners to assess these tactics for their likely impact on staffing levels, community-oriented policing, and several other dimensions. We also assessed the ability of each tactic to signal the agency’s practice of community-oriented policing to the community. Findings Tactics that were perceived to be highly effective for community policing were also likely to signal the practice of community policing to the community. Tactics that perform well for both advancing community policing and increasing staffing levels were often effective on other dimensions such as workload management, immediacy of effect, ease of implementation, and quality of policing. Originality/value Our work extends research on community-oriented policing into staffing, applies signaling theory to police recruitment and staffing practices, and notes tradeoffs in tailoring community-oriented policing and staffing solutions to individual agency needs.