“Safer States: Shoring Up the Public Safety Workforce”

Thankful to have had the chance to present and moderate a panel at the 2025 National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) Summit on “Safer States: Shoring Up the Public Safety Workforce.”

Adequately, staffing public safety roles — especially in law enforcement, corrections, and public defense — has become an increasingly urgent challenge across the country. These are some of the most critical, high-stakes, and high-stress jobs in government, and the people who fill them shape the daily experience of safety in our communities.

Agencies across the country are facing historic workforce shortages. The challenge isn’t just keeping people on the job — it’s finding and hiring enough qualified candidates in the first place.

A lot is being tried, but we still lack rigorous evidence as to what actually works. A lot of agencies have tried throwing money at the problem but as everyone is doing this, it may not add a unique comparative advantage. As Jeff Asher notes, in his excellent Substack “Jeff-Alytics” recruitment bonuses haven’t led to more officers.

This is an area where we need to pilot and evaluate. Taking learnings from other related sectors, there are a few approaches that have been shown to work elsewhere that could be tried in law enforcement: recruitment messaging and format, eligibility testing and standards, and simplifying the hiring process. In addition to these, recruitment and retention can focus on people who are underrepresented in the field, such as women. Piloting efforts, like those identified by the 30×30 Initiative may help increase women recruits (currently only about 12% of law enforcement nationally). And lastly, looking at what roles and responsibilities law enforcement currently do, but may not require a badge and a gun, can also help address the problem. Looking at hiring civilians, such as civilian crime analysts, crisis response teams, behavioral health specialists, or non-criminal traffic accident responders, may also free up uniformed officer time and ease workforce burden.

While this is a far reaching problem across the country, it also affords itself the opportunity to try a variety of approaches and set up some exciting experimental designs. We can’t simply throw things at the wall and hope they stick – but in an ever changing labor market, need to be more intentional and rigorous in piloting, testing, and replicating what works.

In addition to opening the session, I had the pleasure to introduce Director Brian Gootkin of Montana’s Department of Corrections and Dr. Beth Huebner of Arizona State University. They both shared some impressive efforts underway in Montana and Missouri to address their prison staffing shortage – which is also an issue of safety for those incarcerated and working – including how improving conditions inside facilities can make mutually beneficial and reinforcing win-win for both correctional officers and the people incarcerated.