HBCU internships, trips to Puerto Rico: How police are trying to boost diversity

When Eberechukwu Nwanegwo applied for a summer internship at the Baltimore Police Department, she had no interest in becoming a cop. 

Given all the media coverage of police brutality, she was nervous about joining the department and didn’t want to tell her family and friends. But the 23-year-old nursing major at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania needed to earn some money while she was studying for her board exams and she figured it was only a few weeks. Maybe she’d learn something, she thought.

Nwanegwo said her outlook completely changed after the first day. She said her supervisor gave her a binder outlining a consent decree and she was surprised to see the reforms the department agreed to. Throughout the program, she said, she was given assignments she never knew a police department could offer, from buying groceries for victims of violent crime to working in an office dedicated to increasing equity in the department.

“I came in there wanting to just kind of make some money and leave,” she said. “Then I left like ‘OK, how can I do this for the rest of my life?’”

Amid a nationwide law enforcement staffing shortage, some departments are trying to solve the problem by recruiting more young people of color and women, which some experts say could improve policing. Advocates say attracting the next generation of law enforcement requires addressing historic distrust and discrimination by demonstrating that departments have made major changes in their culture, not just offering big bonuses or slashing requirements.

But it's been tough going for some. Nwanegwo's internship in Baltimore was part of a program launched by the Police Executive Research Forum to offer dozens of students at historically Black colleges and universities internships at 29 police departments across the country. The Minneapolis Police Department joined the program and, initially, no one applied, according to Chief Brian O'Hara.

“This is a police department that murdered George Floyd, so there's a whole lot of skepticism about the police department, the city,” O'Hara said.

'Historic' recruitment crisis requires culture shift

Police departments are struggling with a "historic crisis in recruiting and retaining" officers, the Justice Department said in October. Though hiring reportedly rebounded in 2022, agencies are losing officers faster than they can replace them and total staffing is declining, according to a survey of 182 police agencies across 38 states and Washington from the Police Executive Research Forum.

Departments that previously never had to worry about filling their academies are paying attention to how they market themselves, according to Alex Johnston, co-founder of Epic Recruiting, a content creation company that works with law enforcement agencies nationwide. Johnston said when departments approach his company for help with marketing, attracting diverse candidates is often a priority.

More than 14,700 law enforcement agencies employed over 708,000 full-time sworn officers in 2020, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In local police departments, about 14% of full-time sworn officers were women, 14% were Hispanic and 12% were Black. Though experts have said diversity alone is not enough to address all of the issues with policing, some research has shown that Black and Hispanic officers make fewer arrests and use force less often than their white counterparts and female officers take those enforcement actions less often than men.

“If this next generation doesn't choose law enforcement, then we're in a really not only dangerous path, but also a path that's probably going to end in further inequity,” said Andy Saunders, co-founder and CEO of New Blue, which supports officers interested in reform.

Some departments are offering as much as $75,000 in signing bonuses to attract recruits, but Saunders said more money may not be enough to attract diverse candidates. When New Blue first launched, Saunders said he tried to recruit college students of color into the profession, but an analysis of those efforts found even when they were offered an extra $30,000 a year, many would not commit to policing. He said one of the most powerful reasons given was fear of what their loved ones would think of them.

Saunders said some departments have also tried to attract diverse talent by relaxing grooming requirements or updating the application process.

“Allowing tattoos and dreadlocks does not make Gen Z say, ‘Oh, that was the thing holding me back,’” he said. “It's the deeper values.”

Saunders explained departments may find themselves in something of a Catch-22: they want to hire more diverse candidates, but young people of color may not want to join an organization that is and historically has been predominantly white and male. But, he said, in addition to diversity, Gen Z candidates also value transparency, social justice, civic engagement and they are more likely to join a department that shares and demonstrates those values.

“Just having a chief say, ‘I agree that law enforcement doesn't currently serve everyone and I would like to recruit diverse folks that can help me solve this issue,’ and then publicly committing to that change can also show Gen Z officers that department is willing to listen to feedback and take action to address their concerns,” he said.

Police try to entice HBCU students through internships, scholarships, advertising

HBCUs are one of the major targets for police recruiters looking to diversify their ranks. Johnston, of Epic Recruiting, recalled creating a recent ad campaign for the Norfolk Police Department in Virginia aimed at a nearby HBCU that featured several of the department's African American officers.

“We created specific content for that specific audience, and we featured individuals that represented them and could speak to them and inspire them to pursue this as a successful career,” he said. 

However, recruiting from these schools can be a challenge for some departments. Since 2018, 44 HBCU students have expressed interest in applying for the college scholarship offered by the Winston-Salem Police Department in North Carolina. But after learning about the requirements, which include completing a summer internship and agreeing to work for the department for at least three years after graduation, just five of them applied, according to Kayla Carleton, a recruiting sergeant with the department.

“We're serious about diversity, so we're working hard, and that's why we budgeted for this scholarship,” said Chief William H. Penn Jr. “And we want to give that scholarship out more, so that's been a challenge for us.”

While internship programs alone can’t fully solve the nationwide staffing shortage, when they successfully attract candidates, they can be an important part of improving officer recruitment and retention, according to a report from the Police Executive Research Forum. Much like Nwanegwo, every intern who responded to a survey after going through the program agreed the experience had positively changed their opinion of policing in general and as a career, with 65% expressing a desire to apply for a position as a sworn officer, PERF said.

"By helping students gain a better understanding of both policing and police, internships can also help build public trust in the profession, as the PERF-HBCU Internship Program showed," the report said.

Departments look for bilingual recruits in Puerto Rico

Police departments in several states including Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, South Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee have announced plans to attract more Spanish-speaking officers through recruiting in Puerto Rico. Dallas Police Department Chief Eddie Garcia, who was born on the island, has gone back with his department twice in search of recruits and plans to return in April. 

“Nearly half of our population here in Dallas is Latino and there are a lot of individuals that are Spanish-speaking,” Garcia said. “It's incredibly important for us to ensure that we have as diverse a workforce as we can possibly have.”

Garcia said some of the recruits he encounters are hesitant to move to the state, and the department tries to entice them by offering assistance with housing and bringing the other officers from the area, “so that these young men and women from Puerto Rico can see people that resemble themselves, that took the chance, got it and are successful.”

Much like the efforts aimed at HBCUs, not all of the campaigns targeting Latinos are successful. In July, officials in the city of Memphis went to Puerto Rico to fill positions at the police department and other agencies and no one was hired, the Daily Memphian reported. 

“It was a strategy used by some other cities – Louisville, Dallas, and Baltimore – to recruit bilingual employees,” city spokesperson Arlenia Cole said in a statement to USA TODAY. “However, it was not successful for us.”

The Prince George’s County Police Department in Maryland has had to put plans for a recruiting trip to Puerto Rico on hold, but in the meantime, the agency is making a "concerted effort" to reach out to the local community, according to spokesperson Brian Fischer.

“We try to reach out to our Hispanic residents in Spanish and on a vehicle like Telemundo and Univision,” Fischer said.

Nina Medina, president of the Latino Peace Officers Association, said the group is also working with local police agencies to spread the word about job openings to its members and mentor recruits through the process. Medina said it is important to not focus on one group of Latinos when thinking about the challenges of increasing diversity in the profession.

“We're not just talking about Mexican Americans. We're also talking about Puerto Ricans, people from Honduras, Guatemala,” said Medina, a retired detective from the San Diego Police Department. “We're talking about Latinos across the nation.”

Hundreds of agencies join initiative to recruit more women

More than 360 law enforcement agencies around the country have signed onto the 30x30 initiative, a campaign that aims to get police recruit classes to have 30% women by 2030, according to co-founder Maureen McGough. McGough, executive director of the Excellence in Policing and Public Safety Program at the University of South Carolina’s School of Law, said advocates aren’t simply telling departments to hire more women but to think more critically about the skills needed for fair and effective policing.

“If you do that, we're very confident, you'll see an increase in the representation of women in your ranks,” she said.

Effective changes in recruitment could include looking beyond criminal justice majors or military veterans and targeting nurses, psychologists and educators, rethinking when and how recruits are tested on certain physical fitness requirements and making marketing campaigns more accurately reflect the community service aspects of policing, McGough said.

“When I first started getting into this work in 2018, I heard the story about a law enforcement agency, they didn't have any aviation assets, they didn't even have a drone, but the commercial that they put out to get people to go work for them was a giant dude hanging out of a helicopter with guns strapped to his chest, right,” she said. “So that's reaching a very small subset of the population with a message that isn't accurate about what policing is and what it takes to do it well.”

One of the first 25 agencies to join the 30x30 initiative was the Mesa Police Department in Arizona. The department has built a recruitment team with several women, including Elisha Gibbs, who said she is working to do more outreach and education in the community to help potential female recruits better understand what police work entails.

That outreach includes targeted advertisements that help illustrate the department’s commitment to work/life balance, something she's heard women who have or want children are concerned about. While some departments have changed or eliminated certain physical requirements that presented a barrier to women, Gibbs said she’s focused on helping female recruits learn the proper technique to passing a test that once intimidated her: scaling a 6-foot wall.

Since 2020, the number of female officers in the department has risen from 90 to 113. Though the increase is small, Gibbs said the new approach has helped.

“Getting them in on ride-a-longs, if they apply and they’re in the process, bringing them in and talking to them, showing them videos, putting it out on our social media or TikTok or Instagram the different jobs that you can have throughout the profession has been a really big help or push to break past those barriers,” she said.

McGough acknowledged that there’s more work to be done to reach the thousands of law enforcement agencies in the U.S. To make the biggest impact, she said her organization is trying to target state-level agencies and ensure their work is intentionally intersectional, despite a “frustrating lack” of research on how the experiences of female law enforcement officers of different ethnic and racial groups differ.

“We've got to make sure that we stay committed to that intersectional analysis because we know that women aren't a homogenous group and we want to make sure everybody's unique needs are met and everyone's unique value is understood and celebrated,” she said.

Contributing: Bart Jansen