Help Wanted. Columbia needs more police officers and is working to fix it

The State Newspaper is right. We need more police officers in Columbia. Across the country, we are having a hard time hiring new cops and retaining the officers we have. But we can’t use that as an excuse. Instead, we are working on a course correction in Columbia.

For this fiscal year, our council added a salary increase and a new step retention program for the police department to our city budget. The goal is to make us competitive with other regional law enforcement agencies and to increase our retention rates among the officers we have. The step program was implemented recently. It allows more flexibility in giving officers raises and promotions that can keep people in the job longer. Pay is only part of the reason for the gap in our city. By addressing this piece and compensating our officers appropriately, we can start to turn the tide. But it is only one piece to this puzzle.

We are also adding more resources and giving them more equipment to help them do their jobs, which can increase our ability to retain experienced officers. Recently, we voted for $1.7 million in surveillance camera upgrades to help our officers cover more territory. We appropriated $2 million on new police vehicles that are hitting our streets, including more take home vehicles for officers as an added incentive. Our city spent $150,000 upgrading our Shotspotter range, giving our officers another tool to fight crime. We’ve expanded our mental health services for officers, so that they always have someone to talk to when they need. We even created an Office of Violent Crime Prevention, so that we can facilitate data sharing with our police department, the sheriff’s department, partners at the state and federal level, and the courts. Our job is not done though, so we will continue working to provide support for our officers in the future in new ways.

Supporting the officers we have will not stop natural attrition though, so we are considering the way we advertise our openings in the future as well. The initial earning potential is beyond what our police department’s base salary actually reflects, so we need to say that! Recently, the Richland County sheriff asked our County Council for a pay increase just to stay competitive with our department. While it’s nice to hear the city’s advertising is successful from neighboring agencies, it’s important for us to remember that we need to work in collaboration and not in competition. We can’t continue to fish from the same pond, so we need to expand our search for law enforcement recruits nationwide. We need to explore and expand our digital advertising to reach more candidates across our country.

One thing we have in the Midlands that can make us attractive to applicants across the nation: better quality of life. Let’s take the resources we are giving to our department, combine that with the wonderful quality of life offered here in the Midlands, and let’s cultivate applicants from the rest of the U.S. The team at Experience Columbia does a fantastic job of creating resources that showcase our great city. Let’s engage them in recruiting officers as well. With all of these resources at our disposal, we can show the rest of the country that this is the best place to be a police officer.

We also need help from our community. If you are a business owner here in Columbia, we’d love to put up a sign in your window that our police department is hiring and leave a few applications. If you’re a neighborhood leader and you’ve been engaging young people, let’s show them the difference they can make at CPD. We can work together to fill our open spots.

Being a police officer is a tough job, there’s no mistaking that. In Columbia, we are working to pay our cops more, to support them with equipment and resources, and to find new ways to attract more applicants. It is also critical that we support our police and the work they do by making sure that we keep bad guys off the streets. We are currently in the process of overhauling our Municipal Court and appointing judges whose policies don’t allow repeat violent offenders back out. We are hopeful this kind of support makes Columbia a more attractive city for officers.