Edmonds gets creative recruiting new police officers

Published 6:32 pm Thursday, December 24, 2015

EDMONDS — The videos combine upbeat music, scenic views and candid interviews with Edmonds officers.

The police department in Edmonds — Snohomish County’s third largest city — is bracing for a wave of retirements in the coming years, Sgt. Josh McClure said. In the business of recruiting officers, social media is still new thinking.

“We’re preparing for the future,” he said.

The department earlier this month posted three new recruitment videos on YouTube. There’s a nice back story to that effort. The production and editing were donated by an Edmonds man whose job is creating training videos for his company.

Scott Pinzon, 60, works for the EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company that encourages employees to use work time each year for a charitable cause. He was joined by a video crew.

The Edmonds Police Department has more than 50 officers. Their median age is 48 — five years short of potential retirement. The department is seeking new police officers and also those who have worked in other agencies, McClure said. He wants to get across to candidates that Edmonds is a waterfront community, but it’s not as small as they might think. They need people who want to work in Edmonds, where police work sometimes means a major operation and other times investigating a bicycle theft.

“In today’s law enforcement culture, we’re looking for people with really good customer service skills,” McClure said. “That is 90 percent of our job, going out and being customer service representatives for our city. It’s not about car chases.”

Video production of similar quality would have cost thousands of dollars out-of-pocket, he said.

“We didn’t have anything in the budget for that,” he said.

Pinzon and the crew used all of their own equipment, including a drone fitted with a camera.

“We put officers in their comfort zone, in their patrol cars, and we just asked questions of the officers as they drove down the road, and we got their honest answers,” McClure said. “There was no rehearsal.”

About a year earlier, Pinzon had found out that Lynnwood police needed a recruitment video, he said. Helping that department was a great experience for him, and a chance to serve within his community. The team also helped Lynnwood with fundraiser videos for the police dog program, said Lisa Wellington, who works in crime prevention

“We thought a recruitment video would be a cool thing to have,” she said. “It was super fun to work with them. They were just awesome.”

Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.