OLYMPIA — The Washington State Patrol is seeing its ranks depleted faster than can be replenished.
It can’t recruit enough new troopers to fill existing vacancies and newer hires aren’t staying as long as many leave for jobs with local law enforcement agencies that pay better and offer more action.
On top of this, 80 department veterans will be eligible for retirement by year’s end. They could make a difficult situation worse if they all decided to hang up their shields.
So what can be done about this? That’s what lawmakers and state patrol leaders are counting on a consultant to tell them in a study due in December.
“It’s a huge challenge,” said Capt. Monica Alexander. “We’re trying to evaluate how to get people in the door and keep them. We can’t have people going out the back door as soon as one enters the front door.”
The state patrol had 147 vacancies in its commissioned ranks as of Oct. 23, of which 105 were for troopers in the Field Operations Bureau, according to Alexander. An estimated 20 slots are in District 7, which covers Snohomish County, she said.
This year, 33 troopers had resigned by mid-October with many signing on with city police or county sheriff’s departments that have been stepping up their hiring since the end of the recession.
Meanwhile, the state patrol will close some of the gap Nov. 19 when it will graduate its next class of troopers. There are roughly 25 people graduating.
Public Financial Management Inc. is being paid $240,000 to analyze what is causing the recruitment and retention problem, and to recommend solutions. Russ Branson, who is directing the study, presented early findings to House and Senate members at a recent legislative committee hearing.
In the meeting, former Sacramento Police Chief Rick Braziel, a member of the consulting team, described the situation by equating the condition of the state patrol with that of an emergency room patient.
“You’ve got a lot of bleeding going on and it does no good if we’re just looking at pumping in more blood,” he said. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding first and at the same time figure out how we get more fluids in because the rest of the system will start to shut down.”
Consultants have surveyed current and former state patrol employees to try to pinpoint the reasons troopers aren’t sticking around.
Preliminary results show those who’ve left mostly blamed low pay, Branson said. Other big reasons were work load, dissatisfaction with the job and issues with management.
“You need to be paid well and you need to be happy about what you do,” he said, declining to elaborate on the specific management-related concerns.
The study will also compare pay and benefits offered by the state patrol with those of local law enforcement agencies in Washington and other state police operations.
In Washington, the base starting pay for a trooper of $51,480 is lower than deputies of the largest counties, including Snohomish, and cops in the largest cities like Seattle. And after 25 years on the job, the base salary is still lower, according to charts prepared by the consulting firm.
In other places, like California, pay does not appear to be a major issue for recruiting to the California Highway Patrol, yet officers are still hard to find. Salaries of CHP officers are tied to the average annual pay earned by officers in the state’s largest local law enforcement agencies, such as the police departments of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Cadets, for example, can earn as much as $68,000 in their first year.
Still, the CHP, like Washington, is trying to fill its ranks with new recruits. Thousands of fewer people are applying for jobs since the economy heated up, creating plenty of well- paying opportunities in other fields.
“We are all competing for a similar pool of candidates,” said CHP spokeswoman Fran Clader. “Our challenge is finding the qualified candidates.”
Capt. Rodney Ellison, who oversees recruitment statewide for the CHP, said the agency has revised its approach in recent years to speed up the process for applicants. And they are working to better connect with a new generation of potential hires, the Millennials. “When it comes to recruitment (of Millennials) you’re going to have to be innovative,” he said. “Things are different. The way they think is different. You have to be ready to explain why something is important and why it is important to them.”
Ellison, a University of Washington graduate, empathized with the Washington State Patrol’s dilemma.
“That agency is tradition rich. It is very professional. To lose personnel to another agency after you’ve invested so much in them really hurts,” he said. “They’ve got an uphill battle there.”
Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623; jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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