Money isn’t the only reason for
NYPD recruitment woes

My brother, god bless him, wants to be a police officer. He’s the kind of person friends always called on to be the designated driver, to carry the inebriated from the bar, to pick someone up at the airport.

He’s really what we members of the tribe call a mensch. So, this line of work does make a lot of sense for him in some respects. It also comes with great benefits (early pension) and offers a lots of stimulation (as compared to sitting in an office all day long).

He’s been taking the tests at all local police departments (Nassau County, Suffolk County, and New York). It’s really tough to get a job at the Long Island departments given the desirability (low crime, cushiness, much better pay), while NYC is having a really tough time recruiting.

Newspaper reports always say the problem is that NYPD pays less than other departments and also pays a lot less than they should given what police officers are asked to do (risk life and limb). But maybe another reason the NYPD has trouble recruiting is that they treat their recruits with extreme disrespect.

My brother woke up at 4am this Sunday for a 6:30am interview (or so he was told) at the Police Academy on East 20th Street in Manhattan. What followed, as detailed in his new blog on Tumblr, was 9 hours of boredom, condescension, obfuscation and all-around bureaucratic horseshit.

Maybe this hazing ritual was meant to weed out people who don’t really want to join the NYPD, but it defies reason that a police department that is already suffering from a low applicant pool would make the process so byzantine and discouraging.