Police and sheriff’s departments throughout Southern Indiana are on the look out for a few good men and women.
Websites for law enforcement agencies across Indiana, including Daviess County, have posts announcing vacancies and looking for job applicants.
Between retirements, disillusionment with the job and poaching by bigger law enforcement agencies, local departments find that even being at full staff is just a temporary situation.
“We currently are full-staffed. We have one at the academy right now. That will make us full-staffed for a little bit. I think we will have another officer retire next year then we will look to hire someone,” said Washington Assistant Police Chief Dan Christie. “We are pretty consistently down at least one person. That is the way we have worked for the last several years. By the time we get one in, we lose one.”
“We are pretty good right now. We have had an officer retire and right now we have one at the academy and then we hired a deputy from Martin County, so we did not have to send him to the academy. Deputy wise that puts us at full staff,” said Daviess County Sheriff Gary Allison. “It comes and goes. Sometimes we will have three or four positions open and other times we will be like we are now, which is pretty full.”
Not that long ago, vacancies on law enforcement agencies were rare and large numbers of people would try to secure the occasional open spot.
“I know there has been a steady decrease in the number of applicants we receive during the 15 years I have been here. When I tested, there were 30-40 people applying. Before that the numbers were even higher. Now, we have pools as small as eight or 10 people,” said Christie. “We had one instance where the hiring pool was so small that by the time we were finished looking at the background checks we wound up with no viable candidates. That is something you don’t want to see.”
Not only are Washington and Daviess County in a constant search, so are Martin County and Loogootee, and it isn’t just the smaller departments that are struggling to keep the seats in the cruisers full.
“This isn’t just us. Larger departments are down officers,” said Christie. “State police are down consistently. Indianapolis, Evansville, Bloomington, they are all constantly hiring.”
Officials say there are a lot of reasons for the personnel turmoil in law enforcement.
“Sometimes it is hard to fill spots with wages the way they are. It can be difficult for some smaller departments to be competitive on wages,” said Christie. “Sometimes the political environment can have an impact on the public opinion of law enforcement and that can hurt the number of applications.”
“The truth is this line of work is not for everyone,” said Allison. “Usually, people who want to be law enforcement officers, once they get in it they stay at it, but we do have turnover in the jail staff, because the work is not what they expect.”
Support positions for law enforcement, it turns out, are also going unfilled. Allison says he is on an almost endless search for jailers.
“We are always taking applications for people to work at the jail and I know dispatch is always looking for people,” he said.
Daviess County went to a central dispatch system a couple of years ago, and right now officials say they have four vacancies and a real need to find people who can handle the job.
“Working in this field, with the hours and the night shift, it is just kind of hard on people so just like anywhere else right now it is difficult to get people to work,” said Julie Riker, Daviess County E911 director. “This is not an easy job, so getting people to work and deal with the stress of the job, it’s difficult at times. We have people retiring and we have to get new people in here.”
Riker points out that dispatch work is rewarding but it also involves a lot of high pressure, intense work and is not for a 9 to 5 person.
“They find out it is a lot more than just answering the phone. We help people with first aid instructions and try to talk them through doing CPR. It’s just a lot more than what people think it is,” said Riker. “They don’t recognize the stress of the job and the difficulty there is when you are trying to deal with someone who is very upset. It is very mentally taxing. There is a lot of stuff you have to remember. It just takes a special person to be a dispatcher, just like it takes a special person to be any type of first responder. You have to have the heart for it and the ability to do the job.”
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