News
Nationwide staffing issues felt by SPD
Published
1 year agoon
The Chief of the Sheridan Police Department, Travis Koltiska and Captain Tom Ringley appeared on Sheridan Media’s Public Pulse to discuss the shortage of potential law enforcement candidates.
According to a report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, The State of Recruitment: A Crisis for Law Enforcement, 78% of law enforcement agencies reported having difficulty in recruiting qualified candidates. Sixty-five percent of agencies reported having too few candidates applying to be law enforcement officers.
According to the SPD Chief, Sheridan is no different.
The IACP report lists multiple possible reasons for the nationwide shortage; generational differences, public image of law enforcement, hiring process challenges and others. According to Koltiska, each region poses its own challenges on top of these.
In the past, the SPD required potential candidates to take the initial test in person. In certain cases, this required the potential candidate to travel great distances without a guarantee of employment. Recently, the SPD has removed this requirement.
The SPD now offers written testing services for the position of Police Officer through National Testing Network (NTN), a company that contracts with public safety departments across the country to provide professional test administration services.
The shift in testing policy is intended to entice potential candidates to apply for law enforcement positions here in Sheridan without requiring them to travel.
To register with NTN and schedule a test, click here, and select ‘Find Jobs’, then select Law Enforcement Jobs and sign up for the Sheridan Police Department.
mark steingass
September 7, 2023 at 5:04 am
There may be a workable solution…raise the pay for entry level Sheridan Police Officers…and at the same time increase the pay scale for all active duty officers to an attractively higher level of pay than other surrounding states currently offer their own officers. If the City of Sheridan could lure experienced personnel from other law enforcement agencies it may be more cost effective than present city expenditures currently allocated for the training process of new hire entry level officers. In the short term the across the board pay increases could possibly be funded from Sheridan’s ever increasing internet tax revenue and in the long term from federal funding received through bipartisan efforts to reduce crime statistics across the USA.