Most mornings, Scott Paul can be found directing traffic – both vehicles and students – through the St. Cecilia School parking lot in Independence.
The school resource officer has a wide smile, and he cheerfully greets each student as they enter the school. It’s a contrast to the stoney-faced disciplinarians that one might conjure when thinking of police officers.
“I’ve always wanted to help people,” Paul, who in a past life worked as a minister, told LINK nky. “I have never shot at another human being in my entire police career. Very few officers ever do.”
Paul served in ministry for 18 years, but he said he felt called to police work in 1997. He didn’t think he would stay, he admitted, fully intending to go back into ministry once his kids had left for college. The work suited him more than he initially expected, though, and he served in various police roles until 2019, when he retired just before COVID hit.
In September, Independence welcomed him back as a school resource officer.
Independence Police Chief Brian Ferayorni didn’t set out to work in policing either. He said he originally wanted to go into pharmaceuticals, but he demonstrated an aptitude for police work in college. Now he’s the chief for one of the region’s largest geographic areas, accepting the position on the same night the city appointed Paul as a school resource officer.
In spite of these roundabout routes to the profession, both Ferayorni and Paul agree on one thing: A person needs to have an intrinsic desire to be a police officer to succeed in the profession.
There’s another thing Feryorni, Paul and numerous other police attested to, though: There seem to be fewer and fewer people attracted to police work.
As conversations and observations with police and civic leaders across the region show, testing numbers are down, economic incentives to enter police work are fraying and training requirements have become top heavy and inefficient. By all accounts, general interest in police work is waning, and departments are often struggling to fill positions.
Some of the reasons are systemic and mechanical; others are cultural. Go to any city meeting, though, and you’ll likely hear someone talk about it.
“In 2007, when I tested, we had 140 people come take the test,” said Erlanger Police Chief Kyle Rader. The department “hired one person; luckily that was me.”
Rader became chief in 2020, and he said Erlanger’s police department has been fully staffed over the past few years. Still, he’s noticed things change.
“2021, we gave a test,” Rader said. “We had 36 people that applied. Sixteen people showed up for the test. Fourteen people passed. We hired one.”
Fast forward to 2023: “We had 30 people that applied for the test,” Rader said. “Thirteen actually showed up on test day. Eleven passed, and we hired three. We will get another test in May of this year, so down from 140 to 16 people showing up.”
Other departments are showing similar trends. Newport City Manager Thomas Fromme reported at a city commission meeting in June that only 13 people showed up to the police test around that time, adding that there was a similar dearth in applicants for entry-level fire and public works jobs.
Ferayorni said on average between 25 and 30 people, sometimes fewer, show up for each round of police testing in Independence. “When I tested, I tested against 100 guys for one position,” Ferayorni said.
Rader agreed. “We’re all in the same boat.”
One of the reasons most often cited is the police training infrastructure, both in the commonwealth and the region. Police recruits in Kentucky are required to undergo 20 weeks of basic in-person training at an established training academy. They must also complete 80 hours of online training, which can be done during in conjunction with the in-person training. The training is subsidized through the The Kentucky Law Enforcement Foundation Program Fund, a state fund that covers the cost of basic training offered through the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training.
In Ohio, by contrast, a student can pay his or her own way through basic training at any state-certified school or academy, a system more closely resembling trade-school education.
The trade-off is that, while Ohio recruits are responsible for upfront costs, they have more flexibility in where they can be trained. Kentucky recruits don’t have to pay, but they’re limited to large state academies, often housed at universities. There are academies in Richmond, Bowling Green, Lexington and Louisville, the latter three of which offer training only to local recruits. The Kentucky State Police also has its own academy.
That means that everyone else, including recruits from NKY, has to travel to the training center at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond for basic training. What’s more, basic training is a residential program, meaning that recruits can sometimes be away from their families for long periods, another disincentive.
While there are facilities in NKY that offer continuing education for police, such as the Boone Sheriff’s Department and the Northern Kentucky Police and Sheriff Training Center, none of those facilities offers basic training. A university degree in criminal justice doesn’t count toward the basic training requirement either.
This has led several cities in the region to advocate for establishing a local basic training academy. Independence, Fort Wright, Covington and Park Hills, for instance, have all passed resolutions supporting the establishment of a Northern Kentucky basic training center.
Setting up an academy may be difficult, though, and for a familiar problem.
“The primary reason is instructor availability,” Taylor Mills Police Chief James Mills Jr., who is also a board member of the Northern Kentucky Police Chiefs Association, told the Kenton County Mayors Group in November.
Mills said the requirements for becoming a basic training instructor are long and involved. Even those that follow all of the necessary steps have no guarantee they’ll be certified. He gave an example of an officer from Erlanger who was preparing to become certified as an instructor.
“The last class that they had, we had one person in it from Northern Kentucky, and [the Department of Criminal Justice Training] canceled the class,” Mills said last year. The Department of Criminal Justice Training is responsible for training standards in the state.
To make matters worse, several chiefs said, COVID restrictions constrained the ability of the Richmond academy to move recruits through the program efficiently, creating a long backlog of recruits waiting for a spot.
Pat Morgan, the chief deputy with the Kenton County Sheriff’s Office, told LINK nky on March 16 that, if a local department hires a recruit today, it would likely be August or September before that recruit could get into the academy. When contacted, the Department of Criminal Justice Training provided some figures on the scale of their operations and corroborated Morgan’s estimate.
“Approximately 300 recruits graduate from DOCJT’s Basic Training Academy annually,” a statement from the department read. “Four Basic Training classes operate simultaneously, and in consecutive rotation, with a cap of 33 recruits per class. All basic training classes are full at this time, and the next availability for registration is August 2024.”
Since December 2019, 1,357 Kentuckians have completed basic training with the department, the statement concluded.
All of this adds to a large gap between when a person passes the police test to when she or he can get into basic training – as long as nine months in some cases, Rader said. “If you're on the fence, and you're hearing that you’re not actually going to be working by yourself as a cop for another 16 months, maybe you say, ‘Well, this might not be for me,’” Rader said.
Another factor chiefs bring up frequently is reforms that have taken place to the state’s pension system. Underfunded for years, the system has gone through multiple iterations and reforms in an effort to control costs.
Today, police and other state pensions are split into three tiers. Tier 1 applies to workers hired before Sept. 1, 2008. It kicks in after 20 years of service and pays out defined benefits based on the length of one’s career. This means that retired officers under this plan are guaranteed a certain payout upon hanging up their uniforms.
“For people that are looking at government sector jobs, that used to be the big draw was you had a defined pension, you knew exactly how many years you had to work,” said Brad Degenhardt, police chief of Lakeside Park and former president of the Northern Kentucky Police Chiefs Association. “And then you had a general idea of roundabout what your pension was going to look like for the rest of your natural life.”
Most government jobs don’t have salaries that can compete with the private sector, Degenhardt and others said, but many recruits were willing to overlook that if they knew they were going to take home a stable, living income in their golden years under tier 1 of the system.
For those hired after Sept. 1, 2008, pension maturity periods were extended from 20 years to 25 years, but they still had defined benefits similar to tier 1. Workers under this system are classified as tier 2.
Then, beginning on the first day of 2014, pensions were switched from a defined benefits plan to a kind of hybrid cash contribution plan, now referred to as tier 3, which applies to anyone hired after that date. These plans are similar to 401(k) plans and other individual retirement accounts: Officers contribute consistently over a period of time to an investment pool that yields returns upon retirement. Payouts are based on the amount of cash contributions workers make divided by state-managed actuarial factors.
Although a worker’s age and the type of service performed are accounted for in the actuarial calculations, many argued that such plans rarely yield the same payouts as traditional pension plans. This has blunted one of the primary means by which departments attracted recruits.
Salary competition between departments doesn’t help either, especially in Northern Kentucky. Nearly 30 departments are packed into the region’s three counties, nevermind departments close by in Ohio and Indiana.
Median salaries for trained police officers in major jurisdictions in Northern Kentucky hover around $70,000 while the median salary for trained police officers in Cincinnati is closer to $80,000. Moreover, Cincinnati’s starting salary is considerably higher than most Northern Kentucky jurisdictions at about $70,000. The only major jurisdiction in NKY that comes close in minimum salaries is Florence at about $67,000 a year. While it’s true that maximum salaries for officers in several NKY jurisdictions are higher than Cincinnati’s, an early- or mid-career officer is much more likely to earn a higher wage across the river.
The political environment underpinning recruiting isn’t the only thing in play.
“I never imagined myself sitting at a desk all day and just writing paper,” said Elsmere Police Recruit Terry Perry.
Perry graduated from Ryle High School in 2019 and, like Ferayorni and Paul, didn’t actually plan on going into police work. He initially went to college for physical therapy but liked criminal justice so much after taking some classes that he switched majors. He goes to the Richmond academy in May.
“So growing up, I went to high school and everything, and I found out my passion was helping people,” Perry said.
In spite of his interest in the work, he said, many friends and family didn’t think he should become a police officer. His comments give light to one of the key differences Perry sees between the 2000s, when Rader and others came up in the industry, to today: a changing public sentiment around the police.
“A lot of people just don't like the police nowadays,” Perry said. “I've lost many friends just because I’m a cop now.”
Perry’s sentiment is shared by many other law enforcement officers who spoke with LINK nky. Public trust of the police is seemingly on the decline, particularly recently. Many attributed this to a combination of media scrutiny and the proliferation of smartphones and social media, which have made it easier for people to circulate videos of police encounters.
It’s impossible to contextualize this phenomenon without addressing the release of a video showing the murder of George Floyd, a Black Minneapolis resident, by Policeman Derek Chauvin in 2020. The recording of Floyd’s death was one of several video recordings of police officers killing Black Americans that have circulated widely on social media platforms in the past decade or so and which prompted outcry not only over how police forces in the United States treat Black communities, but also more general questions about how police departments operate, the attitudes they instill in their officers and the political economy behind the police as a public institution.
Although the feeling among NKY police that people didn’t like them was common – at least based on the conversations that LINK nky had – it’s much harder to corroborate the scale of these sentiments than the pension and training factors, all of which have concrete figures behind them.
Some polling data offers insight into public attitudes toward the police. Opinion data on the Northern Kentucky region is limited, but there have been studies tracking attitudes toward the police on a national level.
One of the most recent polls was conducted by the Pew Research Center in early 2023; Pew Research conducts polls on policing and other social issues at regular intervals. The study surveyed 5,152 American adults from Jan. 18 to Jan. 24, 2023. Pew then compared similar data from earlier polls they’d conducted in 2016 and 2020. Their results showed that, indeed, distrust of the police was its lowest in 2020, but it also showed that positive attitudes toward the police broadly were actually increasing in the early parts of 2023.
“The share of U.S. adults who say police are doing an excellent or good job in using the right amount of force in each situation increased 9 percentage points between 2020 and the January 2023 survey, from 35% to 44%,” a summary of the study states. “There were comparable increases in the shares of Americans who say police are doing a good job in treating racial and ethnic groups equally (8 points, from 34% to 42%) and in holding officers accountable when misconduct occurs (12 points, from 31% to 43%).”
The only exception to this was whether police were doing an adequate job of protecting people from crime. On this item, “public ratings in late January were lower than in 2020: Just 47% said police are doing an excellent or good job in this area, down from 58% three years ago,” the study reads.
The study also showed that attitudes, whether positive or negative, were often split along racial and political lines, with white adults tending to have higher views of the police than Black or Hispanic adults.
There are two things to note regarding this survey: The data was collected just before the release of a video showing five Memphis police officers beating 29-year-old Tyre Nichols on Jan. 7, 2023; the study’s title and headline indicate as much. Nichols died three days later. An autopsy revealed Nichols' cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head. All five of the officers were later charged with second-degree murder, and the incident led to protests and outcry in multiple cities across the nation. As such, the study’s data can’t speak to whether attitudes took a similar downturn as they did in 2020.
Second, respondents to the survey tended to view police in their local areas more favorably than police elsewhere.
“Regardless of their race or ethnicity, Americans are more likely to say that police officers in their community are doing an adequate job in each of these areas when compared with officers across the country,” the study said. “For example, 61% say police officers in their community are doing an excellent or good job at using the right amount of force for each situation, compared with 44% who say the same of officers across the country. This pattern is largely evident among white, Black and Hispanic adults alike.”
Degenhardt told LINK nky that he’s witnessed changes about attitudes toward police through his career. “I think that has its ebbs and flows,” he said. “Post 9/11, I mean, that was one of the most honorable things was to do law enforcement or firefighting or EMS.”
In spite of Perry’s earlier comments, he told LINK nky that his experience with the local community has generally been good. “What I see in Northern Kentucky is totally different than what people see in the media.”
Even Paul admitted that bad experiences with police would likely influence people’s perceptions. He recounted experiences from when he was working at a high school. Sometimes he would interact with students whose “only contact they may have had with the cops was seeing them patrolling, frisking and arresting their parents.”
Paul and Perry said they believe establishing better lines of communication with different parts of the community were ways to address this problem.
The Northern Kentucky branch of the NAACP agrees and has tried to accomplish that by holding annual symposiums with law enforcement agencies to build better communications channels.
Jerome Bowles, president of the Northern Kentucky NAACP, appealed to shared interests among different communities. However one felt about the police as an institution, Bowles told LINK nky, “we all want people to live in safe communities,” because violence affects every community.
He also emphasized the importance of recruiting police from historically under-represented demographics as a means of building out trust between different populations.
In addition, Perry pointed to the idea of community policing, a term he’d picked up from his time at college.
“If you see a kid just playing football or something, go interact with him,” Perry said. “Go play football.”
“That really brought a sense of communication and community, when we started reaching out to the younger age groups,” Paul said of his early days as a school resource officer. “They started seeing police officers in a different light.”
Bowles, for his part, repeated something to LINK nky he’d told people in the community who wanted to see change happen. “Become part of the institution you want to see changed.”