Phoenix Police to increase women recruitment

Phoenix Police is looking at ways to increase recruitment in the department, particularly among women. At its peak, the Phoenix Police Department had almost 3400 officers. Today, the department has just under 2600 officers.

Joining us on this episode of Arizona Horizon to discuss recruiting efforts is Assistant Chief Charmaine Osborne.

“We’re starting to see better numbers with everyone coming in. It’s offering lots of opportunities for us, not only with sworn but also with our professional staff and hiring in that respect as well,” said Osborne.

The Phoenix Police Department has over 80 specialties for people to become involved in and find an area to excel in.

“We have our canines. We have our SWAT teams, which we call special assignments units. We have our motors. We have our school resource officers, detectives, and we break our detectives down into different specialties,” said Osborne.

One area of interest when it comes to recruiting is lateral hires, or hiring a current officer from another department.

“It’s it’s a quicker fix for us to get somebody up and running right on the street, especially if they’re a local agency. They’ve been through our training,” Osborne said. “But we offer a program that with our laterals that allow us to look at different agencies nationwide and the training opportunities they have. And then they just come in and we use their training hours to equivalent equivalent to ours.”

The Phoenix Police Department recently signed on to an initiative called 30 by 30, with the goal of having 30% of the force women officers by 2030. Phoenix currently has about 14% women officers, with a national average of 12%.

“We have a female mayor at the time, we had a female chief and we had a female fire chief. So we had a lot of women,” said Osborne. “We’re just trying to promote that and attract them into to our profession. It brings a different advantage to the force, and we’re always looking to add those.”