A $10,000 hiring incentive introduced in December to attract experienced officers to the Calgary Police Service brought in 32 applicants.

Nine of those applicants have been selected for the service’s spring class as part of the Direct Entry Officers program, to begin in May.

The Direct Entry Officer (DEO) program is a streamlined recruitment program aimed at attracting experienced officers to join the Calgary police service. Unlike the training regiment for inexperienced recruits, which can take up to nine months to complete, experienced officers only need to undergo a seven-week training program and if successfully recruited would be eligible to earn $10,000 on top of their salary.

In order to be eligible for the incentive, an officer must have successfully undergone the direct entry program and then remain on the force for at least two years.

Recruits from the spring class will be the first officers to receive the incentive, according to the Calgary police.

An emailed statement shared that police have noticed “an increase in interest in our DEO program since the incentive was introduced,” the statement reads. “However, recruitment activity is influenced by a range of factors, including seasonal trends and broader recruitment and marketing efforts, rather than any single initiative.”

The selection process for the fall class is currently underway and applications are open until July 31.

The incentive was introduced in December of last year to make joining the Calgary police force that more lucrative over its competitors, in a national pool challenged by staffing and recruitment constraints.

In a December interview with the Calgary Herald, Calgary Police Chief Katie McLellan stated that staffing challenges remains top of priority when going into the next year.

“If we don’t have a healthy membership, we don’t have healthy deployment models and healthy investigators,” she said. 

A police commission report in September 2025 found that 19 per cent of CPS officers were either on leave or removed from their usual tasks, many of which due to mental or physical injury.