Does Your department tend to hire No LE experience or current officers

[Mr.JackBauer]

Just curious with so many people applying to police departments around the nation, does your department hire more applicants that currently have their license and working at another department or do they like to hire someone with no prior LE experience at all. This of course is pending they pass everything and do good on the Oral interview

[retdetsgt]

We hire strictly on written and oral scores. Someone with prior experience might be a higher oral interview score, but not necessarily. Everything after that is pass/no pass and people are hired according to their ranking on the hiring list.

The only real advantage a lateral has is that they start at a higher pay level and if from Oregon, don't have to attend the full academy.

[Muldoon]

While I realize the NYPD is hardly the typical police department, as far as we are concerned any "license" (which means nothing in New York) or training or even experience you have had is largely irrelevant to the hiring and training process, and our new hires are usually people who have zero experience in law enforcement. Everyone in the class is going to the same academy at the same time for six months (and yes, you get paid in the academy) regardless of anything you ever did before. I suppose that we do occasionally get people who had a prior history of law enforcement (I had a former uniformed Secret Service guy in my class all those years ago), but it isn't as if we look for them, or notice much if we get them.

[ChesCopPodz]

We hire both. But we hire more non-experienced officers. My guess is that it's mostly because we get more applicants that have no experience.

Our average new rookie class has about 20-25 recruits, while we usually have around 5 lateral recruits per class.

[Muldoon]

Our average new rookie class has about 20-25 recruits, while we usually have around 5 lateral recruits per class.

As I noted, the NYPD is not a typical department. My class (which was the second one that year!) had about 2,100, although admittedly it was a fairly big class even for the NYPD. The class that graduated in December had about 1,500, and the class that was sworn in in January, and is in the Academy now with a July graduation expected, has only (only?) 898 recruits in it.

[Joeyd6]

During my state and local time, the hiring was based upon very few factors, but seemed to rotate around the overall ability to be a person of good character and able to think with reason. No prior experience was necessary. Same with non-1811 federal like uniform (USSS uniform, park police,capital police, etc...), and also the FAMS.

Howwver, on the federal level, unless you had some serious special skill/knowledge, for an 1811 slot in the two agencies I have worked for, you were not getting hired unless you did some time in uniform somewhere and had experience.

[Mr.JackBauer]

thanks everyone for the responses

[DeltaV]

The vast majority of the officers we hire have prior experience. Pretty much every test we give is on a pass/fail basis, so there's no civil service list we have to go down.

[Officer20]

This obviously varies from department to department. Out of the last 8 we hired, 2 did not have experience.

[retdetsgt]

One thing out here is we don't have a lot of movement from dept to dept. Most out here pay about the same and have the same benefits. I think a lot of people have reasons for picking the department they work for and don't have much incentive to change. Unless there's a real advantage, why dump your seniority, vacation, sick time, etc?

[Gutwrench]

We hired mostly laterals but those entry level pick ups usually had been CSOs with us. I'm not saying it didn't happen but I don't remember a person hired straight off the street or fresh from an academy.

[Muldoon]

One thing to remember is that while there are about 17,000 agencies that supply data to the FBI UCR, they are not at all equal in size; about half of us work for about 500 very large agencies serving major cities, while the other half are in the remaining 16,500 smaller agencies. For the larger agencies of several hundred to several thousand members, hiring people with law enforcement experience is uncommon, and of little or no importance in the hiring and training process, as all new hires will be trained together specifically for that agency regardless of any training they had previously. For very small agencies (such as those with fewer than ten members), one is typically responsible for getting one's training before hiring, and changing agencies is common.

The question then is whether you are considering becoming a member of a very large agency such as the Chicago PD, or the Philadelphia PD, or the New York State Police (in which case previous law enforcement experience probably counts for nothing), or a member of a small town police department (in which case previous experince may be mandatory.)

[Gutwrench]

That was interesting and thought provoking, muldoon. I haven't the knowledge to dispute your post, but in my experience the smaller departments were more likely to hire straight off the street and even sponsor a cadet through the academy. I don't mean to sound smug, but we were a fairly large dept and except for some extraordinary people, an entry level candidate would not likely make it through FTO or probation. We seemed to focus on laterals as we needed experience due to the activity level.

[retdetsgt]

I doubt we have one in ten that are prior experience. And most of those are from other parts of the country. We have a number of former NYPD and a few Detroit. Very few from within Oregon. And Oregon doesn't have self sponsored academies, you have to be hired and sent to the one state academy.

There was a time when we were hiring lotsa OSP troopers. They didn't have a union then and we made half again as much as they did plus our benefits were much better. For a while, we had enough former troopers to form a good size department on their own. But now they make as much, if not more than we do and they no longer do disciplinary transfers from one end of the state to the other.

[Wolfman]

My old department seemed to hire guys with past experience fairly often, but they tried to also give the applicants a "total package" approach. In general I think their preferences went something like the below, but that's putting it pretty simply:

LEO Certified with Experience
LEO Certified no Experience
College Diploma / Military Background
High School Degree Not Certified

..[et al.].....about half of us work for about 500 very large agencies serving major cities, while the other half are in the remaining 16,500 smaller agencies......[et al.]

Exactly, I believe the newest stats I saw on that were in the LPD-07 (IMHO, like all statistics reports you have to take it with a grain of salt but of the reports that BJS puts out, I actually like seeing that one. If anyone has a link to newer version of the LPD please PM me or reply here).

Where I policed before, 150+ was considered "large" with a few departments being very large; I think for most PD's around large Metro areas, 100+ would probably be considered a "medium-sized" department - some of the Chicago, LAPD, NYPD guys could confirm/deny that though.

624 (5% of total) local police departments employed at least 100 sworn personnel (table 2). The New York City Police Department was the largest, with 35,216 officers. (See appendix table 1 for a list of the 50 largest local police departments.) Half of all departments employed fewer than 10 officers, including 652 departments (5%) with the equivalent of just 1 officer. While departments with fewer than 10 officers accounted for 50% of departments, they employed just 5% of officers. The majority of full-time local police officers (61%) were employed by departments with at least 100 sworn personnel, and a third of officers were employed by departments with at least 1,000 sworn personnel.

NOTE: Emphasis added for ease of reading

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/lpd07.pdf