We face several challenges in filling law enforcement vacancies in Nebraska. This problem is growing and is something that I believe will require new legislation next session. 

On the Nebraska Crime Commission’s website you can find job advertisements for law enforcement officer (LEO) vacancies around the state in city police departments, sheriff’s offices, and county jails. As of this morning, there were eighty-nine job announcements on this page. This list does not include the State Patrol or the Department of Corrections who are also critically short handed and have a significant number of vacancies as well.

The population demographics of Nebraska are a hard fact of life that we must address. The tax base that supports small-town police departments and sheriff’s offices in sparsely populated rural counties will not support paying LEOs a competitive wage. If these departments are lucky enough to find an interested, qualified applicant to fill a vacancy, they then have to wait months for a spot in a training cycle at the Nebraska Law Enforcement Training Center. Nearly eighty applicants are on the waiting list right now. 

Almost one in five applicants who start the course do not graduate due to sub-standard physical fitness, academic performance, and other reasons. The cost invested in this person is borne by the taxpayers in these small communities and counties whether they graduate or not. If the applicant graduates, roughly two-thirds leave the job within five years, many for more populated towns and counties who can afford to pay better. For many western Nebraska departments, the drive to this school is over three hundred miles one way. By the time a rural department gets a qualified LEO back from the academy, they already have ten to twenty thousand dollars invested in them before they serve a day on the job as a full-fledged officer.

The rules we follow in Nebraska need to be updated. Right now, a sitting district court judge cannot teach a law class in our law enforcement academy because they are not a certified instructor. Police and sheriff departments who recruit already qualified LEOs from other states require Nebraska state approval after these departments have already vetted the candidate. We need to address these rules that make it more difficult to hire officers in Nebraska.    

We need to be doing all we can to make the task of finding, hiring and training new law enforcement professionals easier and cheaper. We need to give some serious thought to a Western Nebraska Law Enforcement Training Center. We need to shift some of the financial burden off of these small towns and rural counties. More of this cost should be in the State budget.  

The one-size-fits-all policy we have today needs improvement. Our small towns and rural counties are fast approaching the point where they do not have the resources to provide for the most basic and important function of government – protect the people. When a large populated city or county in Nebraska is short two law enforcement officers, hardly anyone notices. When a county in the Sandhills is short two law enforcement officers, that might be half of the department, and in some cases even more.