The state of Minnesota police recruiting

As part of our ongoing series on policing issues in Minnesota, today we focused on how departments across the state handle recruiting and the challenges they face.

Conversation highlights

Is Minneapolis seeing fewer applicants after the incident in Ferguson?

Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Travis Glampe responds:

What are police departments looking for in new recruits and how has that changed?

Glampe said it's still important for candidates to show their physical skill, but departments are placing more emphasis on people skills.

"In my day it was, 'Is he big enough to fight and can he write a report?'" Moorhead Police Chief Dave Ebinger said. "When you have officers that are actually focusing on things like empathy with people who are under stress, that's a good thing."

How are law enforcement departments addressing retention?

Ebinger said Moorhead Police looked at retention of new officers through their first year and found they were losing about 35 percent of them after hiring. After an evaluation, they found value in starting to test for emotional intelligence.

"We're testing people to see if they can differentiate between their emotions and the emotions of others and apply logic under pressure," he said. "The testing that we use has been very indicative of the kind of people we want."

How is law enforcement recruiting today?

Glampe said Minneapolis is looking for future police officers in non-traditional places. They often visit universities without law enforcement degrees for candidates with different life experiences.

If you didn't go through a traditional route, Minneapolis offers an alternative track to entice people from other backgrounds. With a two- or four-year degree in non-law enforcement, Minneapolis will pay for you to go to school, pay for law enforcement school and put you in a uniform, Glampe said.

He expects to create a strong pipeline from community service officer programs into the police force to help increase diversity. These programs start recruiting in high school and offer help paying for the education required to move into policing.

Are departments focused on having a force that matches their community? What are the challenges faced in diversity efforts?

This is an essential goal in Minneapolis, Glampe said, but it's a tough battle.

You have to want to be a police officer," he said. "It's something that somewhere deep down you want to do."

Minneapolis police officials say they're making slow progress in recruiting new officers from the east African immigrant communities. The city hired its first Somali officer nearly ten years ago.

Glampe said they now have several officers on the force who come from eastern Africa. He says over time, those officers will encourage others from their communities to join up.

"Ten years from now, we're going to have a wonderful number of East African officers on our department, but it something you have to be willing to invest the time as both a department and a community to allow that to happen organically," he said.

In Moorhead, the communities of color are first-generation African and Kurdish, Ebinger said. Many of these families are uncomfortable with police.

"They have frankly told me, 'I don't want my son or daughter in a uniform or carrying a gun,'" he said. "There's some connotations where they come from that make them very uncomfortable with that concept. So part of our job is simply being accessible and educating them as citizens or as members of our community as to what the role of a police officer is in this country."

MPR News' Brandt Williams contributed to this report.