America’s Police Exodus The fallout of ‘defund the police’ is still unfolding. Just ask Brian Lande. Leighton Woodhouse
https://www.thefp.com/p/americas-police-exodus?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Last year, Brian Lande, an officer in the Richmond, Calif., police department, had to draw his gun to stop two drunk men from clobbering each other to death with metal rods.
In 2015, he threatened deadly force to stop a fight between two more drunk men. One was armed with a hatchet. Another, with a wrench.
On another occasion, he drew his firearm to arrest a man hopping a backyard fence, fleeing the scene of a burglary.
None of these was remarkable in Richmond, a working-class city just east of San Francisco that’s notorious for its drive-by shootings, break-ins, carjackings, and countless petty crimes.
When I asked Lande if he often had to unholster his gun—a standard-issue Glock 17—he told me he’d done it so many times that “they all bleed into each other.”
Luckily, he’s never had to pull the trigger.
But things could easily have gone south. If a suspect had made a suspicious move or pulled something out of his pocket that looked like a gun—it happens more than you’d think—he would have had less than a quarter of a second to make the most awful decision of his life: whether to kill another human being.
“You’re in an incredibly inauspicious situation,” Lande told me. “The chance of making a good faith mistake is high.”
What that means is that if you’re a cop, you’ve got to be confident that if a tragedy occurs—if a life is taken that should not have been taken—your chief, your city council, the powers that be will at least treat you fairly, hear you out, and ensure that justice is served.
But these days, a growing number of cops aren’t so sure of that. Making the wrong decision is now a lot more likely to land you in prison, Lande explained. “It’s not tenable for my family,” he said. So in early 2022, he started thinking about quitting his dream job.
He was hardly alone.
A 2021 survey showed that police departments nationwide saw resignations jump by 18 percent—and retirements by 45 percent—over the previous year, with hiring decreasing by five percent. The Los Angeles Police Department has been losing 50 officers a month to retirement, more than the city can replace with recruits. Oakland lost about seven per month in 2021, with the number of officers sinking below the city’s legally mandated minimum.
The list goes on: Chicago has lost more cops than it has in two decades. New Orleans is backfilling its shortfall of officers with civilians. New York is losing more police officers than it has since such figures began being recorded. Minneapolis and Baltimore have similar stories. St. Louis—one of the most dangerous cities in America—has lost so many cops that there’s a seven-foot-tall, 10-foot-wide pile of uniforms from outgoing officers at police headquarters called “Mount Exodus.”
And in San Francisco, just across the bay from Richmond, the police department has seen 50 officers out of a force of fewer than 2,000 take off for smaller, suburban departments, according to Lieutenant Tracy McCray, the head of the city’s police union.
“That was a lot of talent for us,” McCray said. “They were great, bright new cops. A couple of them were born and raised in the city.” These were the kind of officers that advocates for reform say they want more of: cops from the communities they police, black cops, Latino cops. “All of their roots they had here,” she said. “They just up and left.”
A big part of what’s prompting police to leave America’s big cities is the perception the public has turned against them. A 2020 poll showed that only seven percent of police officers would advise their kids to go into law enforcement. Eighty-three percent of those who wouldn’t recommend it cited “lack of respect for the profession.”
“Suddenly, everyone is telling us how to do our jobs. They’re saying we’re biased, racist, only want to hurt black and brown communities,” said McCray, who is black. “These officers worked in these communities, were invested in these communities. Suddenly, people who don’t know us are saying you’re this, you’re that.”
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