| Recruiting diverse, qualified candidates is a continual challenge for law enforcement. Around the turn of the millennium many metropolitan agencies reported a shortage of eligible individuals interested in police work. With the downturn in the economy came a flood of applicants, but also, eventually, slashed funding for recruitment and hiring. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has felt the recession keenly: its advertising budget was cut by 60 percent in fiscal year 2009, city personnel involved in applicant processing have been furloughed regular, and last March the City Council approved a three-month hiring freeze. The LAPD, and law enforcement in general, can clearly benefit from evidence-based approaches to evaluating recruitment programs and streamlining the application process. Using LAPD and city administrative data from fiscal years 2007 and 2008, I estimate impacts- in terms of applicant numbers- for LAPD's recruitment efforts, and I revise a model for prioritizing applicants developed by Lim et al. (2009).;Over the course of the study period, I find overall positive returns to print advertising and recruitment event expenditures, which exhibited elasticities of 0.15 percent and 0.12 percent, respectively. The local impact estimates for intensive recruitment programs vary by site and by how controls are defined, from negligible to significantly positive. With regard to the new prioritization model, I find that military service is not a significant predictor of passing the background investigation but it is predictive of success in the academy and passing probation, conditional on having passed the background investigation. Certain applicant signals, such as missing a preliminary investigative interview and deferring a polygraph examination, are significant predictors of a negative background investigation outcome. The overall predictive power of the revised priority score system is comparable to the original system, though with applicant signals the new model is better at predicting failure.;While the results of these analyses may be of particular interest to LAPD, the methods employed, as well as those recommended for future studies, are applicable to any law enforcement agency interested in attracting and identifying high-quality applicants more efficiently. |
