Interview with Ron DeLord

Ron DeLord

"From the Field Experiences" Feature
Interview conducted in June, 2009

Biography

Ron DeLord was elected in 1977 to the first of ten three-year terms as president of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), representing 18,000 members. He later served as executive director and is currently serving as the special counsel to the executive director at CLEAT. Prior to joining CLEAT, DeLord served as a police officer for the Beaumont (Texas) Police Department from 1969 to 1971 and the Mesquite (Texas) Police Department from 1971 to 1978.

DeLord attended the ten-week Harvard University Trade Union Program, in Boston in 1992. He received a B.S. degree in Government from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas in 1971; an M.A. degree in Police Science and Administration from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas in 1982; and a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the South Texas College of Law in Houston in 1986. He has been a licensed Texas attorney since 1987.

DeLord is a guest faculty member at the Harvard Trade Union Program and the Police Union Leadership Seminar sponsored by the Labor and Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School. He has also served as a lecturer for the Police Labor-Management Executive Leadership Programs sponsored by the School of Labor and Industrial Relations and School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He has conducted seminars and lectures throughout United States, Canada and Australia.

Interview

You've described the recruitment and retention crisis as a "perfect storm" facing law enforcement agencies. Can you elaborate?

Basically what's happening is that over a number of years, there's been a paradigm shift in America where the demographics of the applicant pool from when I was on patrol in the 1960's has changed. The problem is that now we have an applicant pool totally different from anything we've ever seen, but at the same time we have a culture in policing that has not changed substantively in a hundred years. Not an iota. Theodore Roosevelt's reforms in the New York Police Department in the late 1800's, setting up a civil service and promotional system, is exactly what we have in some form or fashion throughout the United States. The shifts we have, the way we advance by seniority, the rank structure, nothing has substantively changed. So we have an applicant pool which says "I'm more interested in time off, quality of life, promotion, advancement", and they're better educated. And then you have a police world where even the brightest chiefs we have came up in the old system. So now we have this clash coming together saying, "why don't enough quality people want this job? Why do we have this shrinkage in the number of people wanting to become police officers?" Because what we're offering to them is unattractive to them. Few of this new generation interested in law enforcement envision themselves on patrol, yet they want the FBI and "C.S.I." positions. That's in their minds, but few are going out wanting to be a patrolman. That's not the pool that used to exist. So all of the recruiting going on nationally becomes departments stealing recruits from each other: the pool becomes exhausted. It's just cannibalism.

As in, departments convincing people to leave one and come to another?

Why would Dallas, a town that has a million citizens and another million in the suburbs, go to Ft. Worth and place billboards talking people into quitting? What is Baltimore doing in Puerto Rico? They're just competing with each other, and eventually that strategy's going to run out. What happens then is a two-edged sword. The benefits and wages are higher than they have ever been, but if they have to steal officers from other departments, standards are going to be lowered to expand the applicant pool, or departments will begin to ignore the morals and standards they expect in an applicant such as no prior drug use and so forth.

Where is this headed?

It's driving civilianization through the roof, because the well-paid police officers are not being paid these high wages to run the auto pound or write parking tickets. Nationally, I'd say we're nearing a place where half of departments are civilians. They've got civilians in traffic patrol, red light cameras, speed cameras, privatization - all these private contractors are the result of the competition for quality officers. The push-back is that there are less and less jobs for sworn officers. My prediction is a move closer to operational policing, where juvenile intake, computer crime, technology work are activities for civilians.

How have departments missed an opportunity to change?

For starters, we lie to everyone who comes down and applies. Take a look at the U.S. Border Patrol recruiting article that was in the New York Times. Thirty percent of all U.S. Border Patrol applicants quit within 18 months of their first assignment. Why? If you look at their advertisements, they've got race cars dressed up, watercraft, helicopters with officers propelling off the side, officers riding horses and so on. The reality is you'll be living in a trailer in Sierra Blanca working 12-hour days, and you have to drive 200 miles to find a Wal-Mart. If you want to see a movie, you have to drive to El Paso! Once they get everyone in and they've got them thinking about these neat assignments, fighting drug dealers on horseback, turns out it could be 4 to 5 years just to get off a checkpoint. You could be many years in most departments where the odds where you even get a weekend off are slim. The first promotional opportunity might be 8 to 14 years away in many departments in Texas. Now if I tell you that the day you walk in you may be on 20 years before you make sergeant, and you're a Millennial generation person, you're going to go to other professions where you can get the money up front. That's the paradigm shift that occurred, and departments are caught up in it and not going to change. But we're continuing to advertise things that no longer exist, or never did.

Has the recession changed this scenario at all?

Anytime five million people lose their jobs, somebody's going to go down to the police department and apply. But that doesn't make the qualified applicant pool expand. You're starting to pick up applicants that we might not really want. The culture of police still is unchanged. If you want to get back the top quality applicants, you're going to have to change the culture of police and we're not doing that. Nobody wants to look at police culture and say are there business models for work hours and hiring that we ought to be looking at? We could better attract the type of people we're interested in who are looking for something different than what's there. The recession isn't going to change the fact that in police academies now, most of the recruits have never been in a fist-fight or put their hands on people. We need to sell this lifestyle to a 25-year old, and we need to look at how we package the lifestyle.

What are some other ways departments can change with this shift?

I also believe that we need to take a harder look, as the military is doing, at whether or not we expect people to stay 30 to 35 years. You say we want the experience, but after 10 to 15 years people want to go. We need to say "we'll let you go - but at lower pension increments". We need to make it portable. We need to consider that in 20 to 25 years, we should begin to model the private sector in 401-K's and portability. Australia already has this model, and there is a constant turnover after 15 years or so - but with a national job data-bank and the ability to take their money and move, recruiting and moving qualified police as their experience and workload changes might be more attractive.

Do you see any obstacles to implementing these changes on a small scale, say in Texas where CLEAT works closely with pension issues?

We'll need a centralized job databank for police work in the state to allow for that mobility. That's one of the things our lobbying team got passed in this legislative session. I haven't seen how long it will take, but we're hoping in a year it can be up and running. It's something that can be done at the national level too, but there's been no energy by chiefs, sheriffs, or any of the national unions to create one national databank. We don't have any common theme across the 18,000 agencies, like they do in other countries. We need to make our work so much more portable. We could have all of our data, access it across agencies - that's where we ought to be going, but there's nobody focused on it. We don't think about things in a global sense. Most agencies don't think past their own agency, and very few think state-wide. So if you want to think about the kind of model we need to add millions of new people into policing in the next few years, we're not doing any of those things. There might be a "best practices" for Las Vegas, but does it reach Omaha? There's no movement on a national scale to address this as a national problem.

What sort of problems might be addressed if we were to do that?

I was at the Police Association of Ontario in Canada, and they asked 400 police in the room to raise their hand if they would encourage their child to enter policing. Not one raised their hand. Nobody said that they would want their child's first job choice to be policing - too hard a life, too many hours - they wanted them to work in the private sector. If that's true, then what are we missing in the puzzle if the majority of police don't see the job as satisfying enough that we would push our children to do it? Decades ago you had whole families in law enforcement. Even the military knows their best recruiting tool is parents and former military. We're not doing that. If we had a push nationally, with information coming out of the national unions and management organizations, and we advertised what policing was really all about, we'd improve as a country how we sell the quality and career of policing. We also need to make sure unions and management know what to do to get rid of all of the obstacles that exist to hiring. The number one turnoff is that the applicant process to get on a police department is mind-numbing! You could be years getting through the applicant process, and they don't keep applicants informed as to what's going on. They don't see it as a buyer's market, but a seller's market. If you applied to go to Houston and they don't keep you informed about your application, and it's six more months for this test, and eight more months for the next test, in a mobile society - you're gone.

We've worked on creating new hiring models in certain Texas cities where we can change the state civil service law by bargaining, and I've gotten our unions to sign off in totally remodeling the old applicant process. We're working on allowing applicants to test all the time, allow them to make offers to the military, have broadband classes, look for minorities and women, or whatever they need to pick out the best of the applicants so they can make them an offer. But we're doing it piece by piece, and we need to look at this globally. I don't think we can solve the recruiting problem in America unless we change, because we are not going to change the Millennial generation to be our generation.

How can policing as a profession change to target this generation's needs?

I would look at the way work is done. Police have to be out there 24 hours a day, but some departments are looking at shift models where you get more time off, and that's something that is important to this generation. Also, child care is virtually nonexistent in the police business. We also know that the divorce rate is astronomical in policing, but is there a department out there that builds into their recruiting that they're going to have child care? If you're going to work and you're a divorced father or mother, and you've got your kids, but I need you to be on call, what are you supposed to do with your kids? The private sector focused on this a long time ago. Part-time work, flex-time work, job sharing - none of these are allowed in policing. A lot of officers get into policing and quit because they don't have these options. If we were to allow you to job-share with another officer who wanted to go do something different with their time, what do we really care if we've got an officer on the street and you can sit down, figure it out, and cover shifts? We shouldn't feel the need to micromanage things in a way that hasn't been done in the private sector for a very long time. Or what about going back to school at night and covering your work hours? Those needs are not going to change. How many millions of new people are we going to have to hire over the next 10 years, and they're going to be even more geared toward lifestyle and promotions expectations than even the Millennials? What makes us believe that we'll be better able to fill those positions if we don't change as a police culture?

What's a ten-year picture of recruitment if we make these changes?

Departments are going to continue to struggle to get the type of quality applicants that they want. The military is using bonuses to keep its members longer, and we're not going to have a military draft to produce the pools of potential applicants we did in the 60s and 70s. Higher wages and benefits being pushed by the unions to fill spots are going to be counter-productive in that they will lead to more civilianization and privatization. We're going to see more technology replacing the police, cameras and so forth. Fewer and fewer jobs are going to be done by the police because of this struggle to fill vacancies. There's going to be a continuing disillusionment by a lot of people coming into police work when they realize the long working hours, lack of leisure time, nothing to attract women and minorities, and no promotional changes. I think you're going to see pressure building to strip away all of the benefits and pensions. For those cities and departments that are smart enough now that they're thinking way outside the box, they're going to be way ahead of the curve. The question is whether or not management is willing to bring the unions in and get the support for this process. I don't see a single recruiting campaign where a union logo is visible! The union ought to be a part of recruiting, hiring, and selection, and should be at the recruiting fairs. That would show applicants that certain departments have a good working relationship between the union and management. If we cannot change the way the new generations are going to get what they want out of the profession, and private industry is making these changes, then we're going to continue to have the same problem.