N.C. Police Force Short over 300 Officers as City Keeps Growing

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department remains short of officers — a problem its spokeswoman says the department is trying to fix as the city’s population grows and homicide rates continue with trends in recent years.

As of early October, there were 1,633 sworn officers at CMPD, which is 304 short of the 1,937 budgeted positions, according to the department.

Sandy D’Elosua Vastola, director of public affairs at CMPD, said there are 108 trainees in the police academy who will join the department after graduating.

“We’re closing the gap in vacancies,” she said. “We’re hiring more, our hiring is up, our applications are up, so that’s really promising to see.”

Forty-eight recruits graduated Oct. 4, helping shrink the number of vacancies. Another two classes are set to graduate on Jan. 10 and April 18, she said.

New graduates are assigned to a patrol training officer for 15 weeks, D’Elosua Vastola said. Then they work on their own.

She said the department has a “robust plan” in place to handle the city’s growing population — about 117 new people per day — as well as homicide rates, which are climbing faster in 2024 compared to 2023.

There were 83 homicides through September of this year, 92 in 2023 and 107 in 2022.

“We’re doing everything we can to have that appropriate response and enough folks to be able to provide that response,” she said.

An ongoing problem

The number of officer vacancies remains about the same as it was in January 2023.

Chief Johnny Jennings said then that recruitment and retention were top priorities.

“If we can’t get more people in the seats for recruiting and hiring at a more progressive rate, then we really are going to have to take a serious look at what can we stop doing and how can we be as efficient as possible with the people that we have,” Jennings said then.

The department had about 200 openings in 2020. Ryan Bergman, who was the Charlotte budget director at the time, told the city council that an average of 69 police officers retired annually between 2016 and 2018.

The department’s rate of attrition — officers who resign, retire, or are fired — is higher now.

The department experienced about 20 departures each month between Jan. 1 and Oct. 24 of this year. In total, there have been 206 total departures, D’Elosua Vastola said.

Cities of similar size to Charlotte, which has a population of over 911,000 people, also deal with police vacancies.

The Austin Police Department in Texas, which has a population just under a million people, has about 1,500 police officers, CBS Austin reported. But it needs about 700 more, according to a city study.

The Columbus Police Department in Ohio had 1,850 officers in May 2024, a decrease of 4.5 percent since March 2020, ABC6 reported. The city’s population is similar to Charlotte’s.

What are the reasons?

Corine Mack, president of the NAACP Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch, said in an interview Thursday that the mistreatment of Black men and women by police have driven them away from law enforcement as a career. Many may be concerned about how their community may view them if they become a police officer, she said.

And police’s implicit bias, and how Black people are treated differently from white people by law enforcement sits “heavily on people’s minds as well,” Mack said. She pointed to the treatment of Sandra Bland in Texas as an example.

Police arrested Bland in 2015 after a confrontation at a traffic stop after she was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change. She was found hanged in her prison cell in what was ruled a suicide.

Footage of that confrontation was released online and the case sparked national outrage over the treatment of Black people by police.

One way to fix recruitment, particularly with Black men and women, Mack said, would be to improve relations between police and people in Charlotte, and police giving “authentic” apologies to Black and brown people.

“There has to be a continuum of community-building the way that Chief Jennings has been doing here in the Mecklenburg area,” Mack said. “I think that some of his officers, because of his leadership, have done a major shift in how they interact with the community, and I think all that’s important.”

Daniel Redford, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police, said vacancies and resignations have officers feeling stretched and working on their days off.

They struggle to respond to calls while being pulled from their divisions to work at political rallies or sporting events, Redford said.

“Officers are frustrated, they’re tired, they’re exhausted, and they are looking to leave, to go to other areas outside of law enforcement or to other agencies that just don’t have the call volume that we currently have,” Redford said.

He said he’s frustrated by the chief’s focus on recruiting versus retention.

“When you have a police officer from Charlotte with as much training as these officers go through, and they leave and go somewhere else, you are losing a humongous asset,” Redford said.

In May 2020, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis after officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for several minutes while Floyd was handcuffed on the ground saying he couldn’t breathe. Footage of the incident led to protests nationally, including in Charlotte.

Redford said photos and video of Jennings kneeling with protesters, with his fist raised in the air in 2020, left officers questioning his leadership.

“You don’t see a photo or anything or any mention of him standing behind the line of his officers who are getting stuff thrown at them,” Redford said. “It really, really divided the officers in showing them that he is more out there for a photo op than he is to be here and stand behind his officers.”

Mack said George Floyd’s murder and the protests may be a contributing factor, but it is not the only reason departments struggle with recruitment and retention.

“I don’t want to attribute it to one incident, which was a more egregious and blatant and clearly televised murder, but Black men and women have been killed by police since the inception of policing,” Mack said. “And the lack of respect that we get continually plays a huge part in why a lot of Black young men and women do not want to go into policing.”

Other problems with leadership have pushed away officers, Redford said, citing Jennings’ slow response to allowing officers to wear a certain type of bulletproof vest they wanted.

Jennings three months ago changed course on the “outer carrier” vests after facing criticism from the FOP and City Councilman Tariq Bohkari for his stance that they were too militarized looking and didn’t improve safety. Officers can now request to get one.

“The goal is to not always be critical,” Redford said. But “it’s challenging. All those factors … are real struggles that we face.”

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