Research

Can't Wait to Retire: Officer Retention amid Turmoil in Policing - Job Market Paper

Amid the fallout from the 2020 George Floyd murder and the COVID pandemic, reports surfaced that an unexpected and unprecedented wave of police officers exited police employment, contributing to severe staffing shortages. It remains unclear, however, which officers left policing and why they left. In this paper, I explore police officers’ decisions to exit policing, examine how these decisions changed from 2012 to 2022, and evaluate the mechanisms that may account for the early 2020s spike in officer exits. After linking statewide administrative employment data to officers’ voter registration records, I find that police exits increased by 1.4 percentage points (70 percent) from 2019 to 2022 for retirement-ineligible officers. Police exits differentially increased for white and Republican officers compared to their nonwhite and non-Republican colleagues at the same agencies. I also demonstrate that in stark contrast to police, there is little change in firefighter exits for retirement-ineligible employees during these years. Collectively, the results suggest that shifts in the police climate substantially contributed to the early 2020s police exodus and that there can be tradeoffs between police reform and officer retention. 

Police Recruitment Following Black Lives Matter Protests (in progress)

Many police agencies report difficulties in attracting enough highly qualified new police recruits, intensifying staffing shortages. Police groups and media accounts often link the challenging recruitment environment to high-profile deadly force protests and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which damaged policing’s public image and inspired key policy reforms. Using detailed data on individual job applicants to a large California police agency, I investigate how high-profile BLM protests impact the quantity and composition of police applicants. I find that job applications drop by 27 percent and 39 percent immediately after the 2014 Michael Brown and 2020 George Floyd protests, respectively, and they decline most for nonwhite applicants. I then explore applicant attrition throughout the lengthy police hiring process. I find substantial disparities in attrition across race, gender, and neighborhood income, suggesting that reducing barriers in the hiring process could improve police force diversity and help alleviate staffing shortages. 

Police Climate and Early Career Officer Retention (in progress)

Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, police leaders and media outlets reported that rising numbers of police officers left policing or transferred to jurisdictions perceived as more supportive of police. In this paper, I investigate how the early 2020s shocks to police climate impact early-career police retention, with a focus on differences across officers and agencies. Using a statewide administrative employment dataset of California police officers linked to officers’ voter registration records, I examine heterogeneity in officer retention across gender, ethnicity and party affiliation. To gain insight into officers’ preferences for jurisdictions, I explore how lateral transfers differ by officer identity, and how the jurisdictions that net-lose officers differ from those that net-gain officers through transfers. Like Filosa (2025) – which focuses on mid- and late-career officer retention – this project contributes new evidence of the early 2020s police exodus its impact on the composition of the police labor force. 

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