By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com
James Holmes has spent the bulk of his young professional career as a social worker focused on juvenile mental health, child welfare and adoption services.
Through those various stints, the one thing he didn’t foresee for himself was a career in law enforcement.
Now, he is one month into on-the-road training as a Lincoln County Sheriff’s patrol deputy – and he just may be the very type of recruit that his department is looking for as it deals with severe staffing shortages and a historically low pool of new candidates.
“At the risk of sounding less than humble, I think I really am what they are looking for these days,” Holmes, 34, said during a recent shift in his south county beat. “Law enforcement is changing. Some of the very people who never saw themselves as candidates even 10 years ago are exactly who they are looking for.”
The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office will have the chance to test those waters Saturday, Nov. 20, when it holds its first job fair and testing event at its search and rescue facility in Newport.
The day-long session aims to shave two to three months off the rigorous and time-consuming hiring and training process that can now take anywhere from 12 to 18 months from the time someone first applies to when they get the keys to their own patrol car.
No advance registration is required for the event, which will allow attendees at no cost to take both the mandatory, state written test for law enforcement personnel, and a standard physical agility test.
Candidates who pass both will be assisted by Lincoln County human resources specialists with the application process. They will be handed a background packet to be completed at a later date and scheduled for in-person interviews to be conducted in early December.
The event is the brainchild of Sgt. Jack Dunteman, who is very candid when asked where he got the idea.
“Tillamook did one in September,” he said. “So I kind of stole the idea from them.”
After the Tillamook Sheriff’s Office posted the results of their hiring event on social media, Dunteman said he was shocked to see that more potential candidates showed up for the session than had applied to Lincoln County all of this year.
A state, national struggle for officers
The county’s hiring fair comes at a critical time, as law enforcement agencies across Oregon and around the nation struggle to find new hires to replace veterans leaving the ranks.
The city of Portland, for instance, currently deploys fewer sworn officers than at any time in the past three decades, according to records reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive. The review found that the primary reason for that is the city’s struggle to hire new officers, while retaining the ones it already has.
And the problem is by no means limited to Oregon. So far this year, fully 86 percent of departments across the country are reporting staffing shortages, according to a recent survey conducted by the National Police Foundation.
In Lincoln County, that shortage translates to three vacancies in a patrol staff budgeted for 18 positions, Sheriff Curtis Landers said. When all of his office’s 29 budgeted positions are taken into account, the number of vacancies grows to six.
“I’ve never seen staffing challenges this high,” said Landers, whose career in law enforcement – all of it in Lincoln County – spans 34 years. “When I first started, it was highly competitive everywhere. Now, people can choose where they want to work.”
Which brings veterans like Landers and Dunteman, who came to the county from the Newport Police Department, back to newcomers such as Holmes, who has lived in Lincoln County for eight years.
Attracting job candidates who have lived in the area for some period of time, who know their way around the back roads and even may have family in the county may well be the best way to hire patrol deputies who are most likely to stay for years and decades to come, they say.
In addition, a heightened shortage of affordable housing in the area always presents challenges to luring candidates to the coast, the sheriff said.
“We’re not just catering to locals,” Landers added. “But we are still really trying to get the word out to those living here who might switch jobs and may not think they can do a law enforcement job.”
Dunteman agreed.
“We’re not trying to say if you’re not from around here that you’re worthless to us,” he said. “Not at all. But we also know from experience that if we can get local people who have spent their entire lives here, that is going to end up helping our attrition rate.”
Both emphasized the decent salary a deputy’s position pays. The base salary for someone with no experience or advanced education begins at $27.31 per hour – or $55,000 a year before benefits like health insurance and retirement. The highest rung on the hourly pay scale tops out at $37.62.
“We don’t have any monetary bonuses associated with this hiring event,” Dunteman said. “The hidden incentive is the accelerated hiring process itself. If you’ve been through even one or two of these in your life, you’ll know that reducing the hiring process this much is a huge, huge thing.”
Still, he, like all others associated with the event aren’t sure what to expect.
“We ordered 70 written exams,” Dunteman said. “We could see way more or way less than that in actual attendance. We’re just hoping for the best.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. He can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com
I find it interesting that one of the reasons cited for the shortage of police is because there isn’t enough housing in the area. All we have heard for the last year and a half is “defund the police” and we don’t need more police, we need community programs and let’s let more violent offenders out of jail. Many of Portland police have left in frustration of how they were treated by the mayor and governor. Now they wonder why there is a shortage of people who put their lives on the line only to be back stabbed by the same people that want us now to hire more. This chaos has been created by the very people in charge. Wake up folks.