The New Orleans Police Department today announced a new recruit class. This comes as the department continues to struggle to fill its depleted ranks. Making matters worse, the number of out-of-state candidates has dried up following the NOPD's takeover of its own recruiting efforts.
However, one police official says, there is a glimmer of hope.
"As far as recruitment is concerned, we are hiring more people than we have in the past, and that's a good thing," said Police Association of New Orleans President Michael Glasser.
Glasser told WWL's Tommy Tucker that the NOPD is trending in the right direction in terms of hiring, but he says finding good officer candidates is still a challenge.
"We're still losing more people than we're hiring," Glasser said. "We're just doing so at a lower rate."
According to NOLA.com, out-of-state applications dried up after the NOPD took over recruiting from the Police and Justice Foundation. Glasser says he hopes the NOPD doesn't lower its recruiting standards in an attempt to fill those gaps. Glasser cited the NOLA.com report when discussing his fears, noting that the NOPD reportedly made the civil service exam for police recruits "more passable."
"In an effort to boost numbers, you don't want to take on that one individual who's going to turn around and wind up being famous for the next 30 years," Glasser said. "I think we all know the Antoinette Frank issue and the Len Davis issue. We don't want to repeat those. We had a number of other officers that were less infamous but equally as bad. We don't want that to happen again. This is not a business that you want to give the responbility and authority to individuals who are not capable of exercising it legally and properly and ethically."
Still, Glasser is pleased that the NOPD is interviewing more officer candidates.
"That's a good thing," Glasser said. "That's a good trend, but we're still way far from out of the woods."
