The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department continues to be short of officers — a problem the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department spokeswoman said it is trying to solve as the city’s population grows and homicide rates continue to trend in recent years.
As of early October, there were 1,633 sworn officers in the CMPD, which is 304 fewer than the 1,937 budgeted positions, according to the department.
Sandy D’Elosua Vastola, public affairs director for CMPD, said there are 108 police academy trainees who will join the department after graduation.
“We are closing the gap in vacancies,” she says. “We’re hiring more, hiring is up and applications are up, so that’s promising to see.”
On October 4, 48 new employees graduated, reducing the number of vacancies. Two more classes will 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. They then start working independently.
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 rising faster in 2024 than in 2023.
Through September of this year, there were 83 murders, 92 in 2023 and 107 in 2022.
“We are doing everything we can to get an appropriate response and enough people to be able to provide that response,” she said.
An ongoing problem
The number of officer vacancies remains approximately the same as in January 2023.
Chief Johnny Jennings said at the time that recruitment and retention were top priorities.
“If we can’t recruit and hire more people in a more progressive way, then we’re really going to have to take a serious look at what we can stop doing and how we can be most efficient with the people we have,” Jennings said then.
The department had approximately 200 vacancies in 2020. Ryan Bergman, Charlotte’s budget director at the time, told the council that an average of 69 police officers retired each year between 2016 and 2018.
The department’s turnover rate — officers resigning, retiring or being fired — is now higher.
The department had approximately twenty departures per month between January 1 and October 24 of this year. In all, there have been a total of 206 departures, D’Elosua Vastola said.
Cities of a similar size to Charlotte, with more than 911,000 residents, are also struggling with police vacancies.
The Austin Police Department in Texas, which has a population of just under a million, has about 1,500 police officers, CBS Austin reported. But about 700 are still needed, according to a city study.
The Columbus Police Department in Ohio had 1,850 officers as of May 2024, a decrease of 4.5 percent since March 2020, ABC6 reported. The city’s population is comparable to that of Charlotte.
What are the reasons?
Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NAACP chapter, said in an interview Thursday that the mistreatment of black men and women by police has driven them away from their careers in law enforcement. Many may worry about how their community will view them if they become police officers, she said.
And police implicit bias, and the way black people are treated differently than white people by law enforcement, “is also heavy on people’s minds,” Mack said. As an example, she cited the treatment of Sandra Bland in Texas.
Police arrested Bland in 2015 after a confrontation at a traffic stop after she was pulled over for failing to signal for a lane change. She was found hanged in her prison cell, which was ruled a suicide.
Footage of that confrontation was released online and the case sparked national outrage over police treatment of black people.
One way to improve recruitment, especially among Black men and women, Mack said, would be to improve relations between police and people in Charlotte, and for police to issue “authentic” apologies to Black and brown people .
“There needs to be a continuum of community building like Chief Jennings has done here in the Mecklenburg area,” Mack said. “I think some of his officers, because of his leadership, have made a big change in the way they interact with the community, and I think that’s all important.”
Daniel Redford, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police, said the vacancies and layoffs are leaving officers feeling overloaded and working on their days off.
They struggle to respond to calls as they are 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 want to leave, 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 is frustrated with the chief’s focus on recruitment versus retention.
“When you have a Charlotte police officer with as much training as these officers have, and they leave and go somewhere else, you lose a tremendous asset,” Redford said.
In May 2020, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis after officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for several minutes as Floyd lay on the ground in handcuffs, saying he couldn’t breathe. Images of the incident sparked protests nationwide, including in Charlotte.
Redford said photos and videos of Jennings kneeling with protesters in 2020, with his fist in the air, caused officers to question his leadership.
“You don’t see a picture or anything like that or any mention of him standing behind the line of his officers getting stuff thrown at them,” Redford said. “It really divided the officers because it showed them that he’s more out there for a photo than to be here and stand behind his officers.”
Mack said the killing of George Floyd and the protests may be a contributing factor, but it is not the only reason why departments are struggling with recruitment and retention.
“I don’t want to attribute it to one incident, which was a more blatant and egregious murder that was clearly televised, but black men and women have been killed by police since the beginning of policing,” Mack said. “And the lack of respect we continually receive plays a major role in why many black young men and women do not want to join law enforcement.”
Other leadership issues have pushed officers away, Redford said, citing Jennings’ slow response to allowing officers to wear a certain type of bulletproof vest they wanted.
Jennings changed course on the “outer carrier” vests three months ago after receiving criticism from the FOP and City Council Member Tariq Bohkari for his stance that they looked too militarized and did not improve security. Agents can now ask for it.
“The goal is to not always be critical,” Redford said. But “it’s a challenge. All of these factors… are real issues that we have to deal with.”
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