Wanna be a cop? San Antonio City Council has approved a $600,000 four year contract with an advertising firm to recruit 'diverse and qualified' applicants for the San Antonio Police Department, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Chief Bill McManus says says the company has been working on the issue for a couple of months, and has already produced results.
"The biggest thing that they've done, is they have engineered an on line application that other companies were not able to do," he said. "We are averaging eleven applications a day, just from this online application process."
Experts say recruiting for big city police departments has become more difficult in recent years for two reasons.
First, there is the anti-police sentiment which is growing in some communities, making becoming an officer a less 'acceptable' profession to some.
But the main concerns is for the long term future of city pension programs. The City of Dallas last year had to make major cuts to its pension program, essentially reducing the benefits which prompted many people to join the city's police force to begin with, and many major cities nationwide have billions of dollars in 'unfunded liabilities' to pay for pensions which they have agreed to pay over the coming several decades.
In addition, the Baby Boomer generation which joined police forces in the 1970s and 1980s are retiring, leaving many forces with huge gaps in the ranks that need to be filled.