Gilbert Police Department amps up recruiting efforts in tough environment
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Realistically we’re hiring folks here to serve for 25 years. ... We want them to be contributing members to the department and to the town for a very long time.”
Facing a possible wave of retirements over the next few years, the Gilbert Police Department is working to keep its force strong.
The town is showcasing its Public Safety Training Facility and recently signed on a national “30 by ‘30” initiative for police departments to increase the percentage of female sworn officers to 30% by 2030.
But the efforts come at a time when efforts to recruit officers are proving difficult, not just in Gilbert, but everywhere, department officials said.
Highly publicized cases of officer-involved deaths and shouts in some corners to defund the police can make with the young adults who could be the next generation of officers.
“It is challenging, especially because this is probably one of the times in my lifetime where it’s been the least popular to be an officer nationally,” said Jacques Tregre, the department’s recruitment sergeant. “That causes some problem for us.”
Nevertheless, Tregre said he believes the department is keeping up well. As of the end of September, the department had only three openings, a number the department can easily manage as it is less than 1% of its sworn workforce.
The department anticipates it will have a class of about 15 recruits when the next GPD Academy class convenes for training March 23, which will fill those openings and and others that will come between now and then.
The challenge
Having three openings with a department authorized to have 323 sworn positions is not an issue, particularly compared with some other departments, Tregre said. But what is seen on the horizon could be.
“We’re forecasting what’s going to happen in the future once everybody hits that retirement age,” he said. “And then, as we know that even if we hire a person to go into the academy, it doesn’t necessarily mean that recruit that’s hired at the academy comes down the back door and ends up being the full-time officer. There is a degree of attrition throughout the academy through field training.”
Retirement is not the only way to lose officers. Discipline, injury, even death can factor in, as well as the decision to pursue another field or join another department, though Tregre said that does not happen frequently in Gilbert.
The challenges in attracting officers can be twofold: the danger of the profession and the perception of who officers are. In the former case, Tregre mentions an incident in Dallas in 2016 in which a man ambushed officers, killing five and injuring nine others.
“We saw our recruitment numbers dropped quite a bit on the heels of that because the reality of what it means to be an officer, and maybe that risk you might have to put yourself in became very in-your-face and apparent,” he said.
Other incidents, where police killed someone, also hurt.
“It’s kind of the same thing there where you are being labeled by virtue of what you do for a living,” Tregre said. “We have to fight against that.”
Officers do try to put their best face on for the public in for initiatives like “Coffee with a Cop” that Gilbert has had for several years as well as starting younger in getting people to think about law enforcement as a potential career with school resource officers and or having 14- to 21-year-olds in the cadet academy program.
Additionally, Tregre said the department is not recruiting against other departments.
“I like to say that our competition really isn’t just the neighboring East Valley agencies or those in Arizona, but it’s all the jobs,” he said. “Whether it’s large manufacturing plants, people who decide to stay in the military and not get out, or they finish their four-year degree at a local university or college, and they decide to go into the career path that they’ve actually been studying for, we are competing against everybody.”
The pitch for Gilbert
Tregre said Gilbert does seem to be an attractive place for those interested in law enforcement as a career to work.
“I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is about here, whether it’s the town environment, the culture of the department, just the fit and finish of the town itself,” he said.
But one measure he sees is in the “laterals” — hires that come from outside departments. Tregre said every time testing opens for recruits, the department sees laterals who want to come to Gilbert. But he said he can count on one or two hands those who have left to go elsewhere.
The department also has a robust wellness program as it seeks for its employees to have a good work-life balance.
“Realistically we’re hiring folks here to serve for 25 years, not to come here for five years, get burned out and be sick of law enforcement and move on,” Tregre said. “We want them to be contributing members to the department and to the town for a very long time.”
Gilbert police spokesperson Brenda Carrasco also points out the town has some progressive benefits that can be attractive, like a baby-at-work program that allows officers to bring in newborns to work them. Patrol officers can be reassigned temporarily to light duty to take advantage of it, she said.
The Public Safety Training Facility also plays a role beyond just the face that it is the training site for those new hires. Tregre called it the “crown jewel.”
“We have the nicest driving track out here in the Valley,” he said. “We have the largest indoor shooting range for training for proficiencies. A large modular tactical building, state-of-the-art classroom projectors, competence monitors for instructors — just having that 50-acre facility, um, allows us to do everything in house here. So yeah, it is a massive advantage for us.”
30 by ‘30
One important initiative for the department is its involvement in the national 30 by ‘30, the effort to get more women involved in law enforcement. Gilbert’s force includes about 10% women, a little behind the national average of 12%.
Sgt. Sharon Castronova, who works in the department’s public affairs division, said the challenge is more than overcoming stereotypes about who goes into law enforcement.
“Maybe they didn’t grow up thinking, ‘Hey, I want to be a police officer,’” said Castronova, a 19-year veteran of the force. “That’s one of the things I see all the time whereyou find a lot of male officers are like, ‘This is all I wanted to do. I was playing cops and robbers when I was 2 or 4 or whatever. Females didn’t probably have that.”
Castronova said women bring a different perspective to the job, a lens that can be important to consider. And some victims may prefer talking to a woman in certain situations, though she also avoids scenarios where, for example, on a domestic dispute call the female officer automatically talks to the woman while the male officer talks to the man.
Castronova said she likes to act as a mentor for new female officers, much as she had when she was starting out. The support, she said, is important, but she and Tregre said they do not believe women face an uncomfortable environment in the department, though they are outnumbered.
“I see the the female officers on teams right now, and it’s just like they work with their brothers,” she said. “They are just family, and the gender doesn’t matter.”
Regardless, the grind of policing is real, male or female. Tregre said it is important to have that calling to do the job.
“I tell the recruits all the time that this isn’t your typical 9-to-5 job,” he said. “You’re going to work weekends, you’re going to work nights, you’re going to work weekend nights, you’re going to work weekend nights on holidays. And if you’re motivation isn’t altruistic about why you want to get into this field, it can be a hard path to walk sometimes.”
Tom Blodgett can be reached at tblodgett@iniusa.org or found on twitter @sp_blodgett.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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