Recruiting efforts are paying off for the Albuquerque Police Department. Now the focus is on the retention of veteran officers.
“Retention became a big issue and that’s what I want to talk about, the retention of our officers,” APD police chief Harold Medina said during a press conference. “We knew retention was key. We were losing 10 to 15 officers a month.”
APD adopted a two-pronged approach to address its retention issues: reward those who stay and increase the base pay for all positions. “Any officer with 19+ years is given a bonus of $1,500 a month,” Medina said.
Higher pay has been at the root of increased recruitment and retention for the department. Cadets are getting the biggest raise of an extra $10 an hour. Patrol officers are getting a seven-dollar raise, and lateral officers or transfers from another department will see a one-dollar increase, per KOB. “This is a very different APD than it was two years ago,” Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller said.
The APD currently has about 850 officers, Medina said. Another 27 soon will be graduating from the police academy, and 14 other officers have transferred in from other departments across the state, per KOB. That would bring their officer count up to 890. The mayor and chief have mentioned increasing the police force to 1,200 officers. “We have been pretty consistent in hiring 100 officers every year and that worked well for us in 2018 and 2019,” Medina said.
The city has spent $60 million on what the mayor views as crime-fighting technology, like gunshot detectors, speed cameras, and license plate readers.
“All of these things are supporting our officers so that we can apprehend and capture and have good legal cases to help keep those who have done bad things in our city off the street,” Keller said.