Come Make $100,000, the Billboard Says: Police Departments Are Hustling For Recruits (especially when wages are rising for other jobs)

It’s hard to hire police officers, especially in and around big cities, so departments are getting creative

By Harriet Torry of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Policing, like teaching and nursing, has struggled to get and keep workers since the pandemic. Burned-out employees have resigned or retired. There were nearly 19,000 fewer officers in 2023 than 2019, a 3% drop, according to Labor Department data."

"In 2023, the average annual wage for police and sheriff’s patrol officers was $76,550, about a 13% increase from 2019, according to Labor Department data. The average wage for all occupations was $65,470 in 2023, though that was up 22% in the same time frame."

So wages rose faster in non-police occupations. Ceteris paribus, the quantity of labor supplied in the police market will fall.

This related to something I used to talk about in my micro class.

For the whole market, the wage is simply determined by the supply and demand curves. The demand for the whole market would be found by adding the demand (or MRP) of each individual firm.

It would seem that the supply for the whole market would also be the sum of the supply curve for each individual in the market. But it is not that simple, since the labor supply for each individual likely looks something like the labor supply curve in the graph below.

In this graph, L stands for the number of hours worked. As your wage increases, you are willing to work more hours. But to do so, you have to sacrifice leisure time. The higher wage allows you to buy more goods, but at a cost of less leisure. But at some point, your wage gets so high, that it allows you to buy all the goods you want. So now you want more leisure time, which means you need to work less.

Imagine if your boss offered to double your hourly wage. You might want to put in more hours. So as W increases, so does L. But if your wage was extremely high, say, $1,000 per hour, you might work just a few hours a week, meaning the number of hours worked (L), decreases. So there must be a wage so high that when you reach it, you start to reduce the number of hours that you work.

The typical American worker worked many more hours a week about 100 years ago than today. They may have worked 60 hours or more. Today, we work fewer hours a week (around 40) yet the average income (adjusted for inflation) is much higher. We make enough money so that we can work less and have the goods we want.

So why can we draw the market supply curve upward sloping if it is “backward bending” for individuals? There are two reasons:

1. As W increases, workers from other industries enter the market in question, so L increases. When W increases, we assume it increases in one market only. For example, if the wage paid to janitors increases, convenience store clerks will apply to become janitors.

2. As W increases, nonworkers enter the market in question. Some workers who were not previously working in any market, will start to apply for jobs if the wage rises high enough. Examples might be stay at home spouses and students.

(I think I got this from Bradley R. Schiller's textbook)

In both cases, an increase in W leads to an increase in L. This is required for the supply curve to slope upward for the market. These two forces will outweigh any “backward bending” effect.

So wages are determined by the supply and demand for the job or occupation.

Related post:

Inter-industry competition can affect labor markets (2023) (this was about an auto related company in Alabama that was not only competing for workers with other firms in its industry but also with restaurants and retailers)