ON THE COVER
Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal (foreground) and Arcata Police Chief Brian Ahearn are both thinking outside the box as they try to hold the line on service levels with depleted staffing. Photo by Mark McKenna
Help Wanted
A staffing ‘crisis’ has law enforcement triaging while grasping for answers By Thadeus Greenson thad@northcoastjournal.com
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n Eureka, officers are working an emergency schedule built on 12.5-hour shifts and mandatory overtime, as the police department’s once touted Problem Oriented Policing and Community Safety Engagement teams operate with skeletal staffing. In Arcata, two detectives have been pulled back to patrol and all calls for service that don’t involve someone in danger have been deprioritized, while proactive policing measures — like traffic enforcement in front of local schools or a detail to address the problematic group of homeless people doing drugs and relieving themselves in public near the Arcata Community Center — have been shelved. For the Humboldt County Sheriff’s
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Office, 12-hour schedules and mandatory overtime — with deputies working holidays and weekends and days off — have become the norm. Resident deputy posts sit vacant while regular rural patrols and around-the-clock coverage of outlying areas have been abandoned for the time being. Amid a pandemic, deputies are afraid to call in sick for fear of leaving their co-workers stretched even thinner while the county looks to renegotiate police services contracts with the cities of Blue Lake and Trinidad because it can’t deliver the promised regular patrols. Some nights, just eight deputies are left to cover the county’s almost 4,000 square miles of unincorporated territory. “That’s a lot of ground to cover,” says
NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021 • northcoastjournal.com
Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal over the phone, frustration evident in his voice. Humboldt County’s largest law enforcement agencies are all struggling to recruit and retain officers, mirroring state and national trends that see higher rates of officers retiring or otherwise leaving the profession, with a shallowing pool of applicants signing up to replace them. The issue isn’t new — we wrote about it in these pages in January of 2020 (“Recruitment and Retention”) — but it seems to be getting worse, not better. The reasons are myriad — what some describe as a “perfect storm” of challenges facing the profession — but the result is that agencies are vying for any and all
recruitment and retention advantages. Officials are also increasingly looking for outside-the-box solutions to maximize officers’ time and have non-sworn personnel respond to calls that don’t necessarily demand the presence of a badge and a gun.
The Storm
College of the Redwoods’ Police Academy once turned away scores of applicants, with its program capped at 40 students a semester. But, currently, it has just a dozen cadets enrolled. And that’s not a problem unique to CR. Academies across the country are reporting fewer applicants. Nationwide, a Police Executive Research Firm survey earlier this year found departments were seeing an overall decrease of 5
