Phoenix Police face 30% recruit dropout rate | News

When it comes to joining the Phoenix Police Department’s recruitment efforts, many are called but too many are dropping out.

As Chief Matt Giordano and aides appeared at the Sept. 3 City Council Public Safety and Justice Subcommittee to discuss the department’s improving recruitment rate, Councilman Jim Waring expressed alarm over the fact that 30% of police academy trainees and first-year officers quit over the last three years.

The department told the panel that 478 recruits were hired over a three-year period, between 2022 and 2024, but only 305 became sworn officers while 27 others opted for civilian jobs, leaving 146 who decided police work just wasn’t for them.

The discussion came during the committee’s monthly examination of Phoenix Police Department’s efforts to close the gap between its 3,125 budgeted positions  and the 2,635 officers it actually has.

Stating “that 30% just seems high,” Waring told department leaders that the dropouts represented “wasted money by the Phoenix taxpayers, a waste of your time.”

“We need bodies in the uniforms to address the issues that we were talking about earlier in this meeting,” Waring said, referring to a lengthy discussion the panel and police officials had about its targeted enforcement campaigns in five city neighborhoods, mostly in the northern part of the city.

He urged Chief Matt Giordano and Commander Leif Myers to cut that drop out rate to 15%

Giordano, in his first appearance before the subcommittee as chief after he was sworn in two weeks ago, said the three most common reasons why recruits leave are personal, though some sparked “firearms concerns” during field training while others exhibited “transitional struggles with shift report writing.”

He also said that when he hears of a recruit or a veteran who intends to leave, he gives them a day off to think about it and then talks with them about their reasons.

He recalled one academy trainee who said he wanted to  drop out because he had had a “bad day” and that he told the recruit he was “doing great in the academy” and encouraged him to talk with his family about his intention.

“He went home, talked it over the family and he’s like, ‘I still want to be there,’” the chief said.

“This number was concerning to all of us when we were looking at the data and seeing how many people who have invested in not just going through the application process, but going through the academy and field training were leaving the organization,” Giordano said. 

“While that number is not unusual when we look at what happens in other academies, we don’t want this to be the norm,” he continued. 

“We want to have the lowest attrition rate when it comes to folks who out of the academy or field training. And so that is going to be a focus area of ours. And we want to make sure that the investments that we’re making and that these individuals are making in Phoenix are something that we’re going to continue to see bear fruit.”

Meanwhile, Giordano and his aides had encouraging news about the department’s recruitment success.

“As of July 2025, the Department received 3,071 applications from recruits, a significant increase from the 1,401 applications received by June 2024,” they said in a report to the subcommittee.

Transfers from other law enforcement agencies increased from 112 to 184.

“The academy class sizes also saw a substantial boost, with Class 1 growing from 14 to 30, Class 2 from 18 to 41, Class 3 from 18 to 45 and Class 4 from 24 to 32,” it said.

Giordano said his efforts just won’t be focused on newcomers to the police force but on veteran officers as well. 

In the  first seven month of this year, 108 people have left the force, including 26 with under a year on the job. 

The next highest number of officers who quit by years of service are those with 21-25 years of service. They totaled 32 – more than a quarter of this year’s departures – while 17 with over 26 years on the job also left.

Vice Mayor Ann O’Brien encouraged Myers and Giordano to think of ways that recruits can spend more time with sworn officers.

She noted that the Fire Department, for example, allows potential recruits to “hang out at the fire station” and go on ride-alongs.

While she stressed “there is a significant difference between what the Fire Department does and what the Police Department does,” she told the two men:

“I would challenge you to find out ways to make the doors open to folks who think they want to become police officers, to spend more time with our officers on the streets.”

Myers said that with pre-hired recruits, the department two months ago began exposing them to report-writing classes and “sending the pre-hires through as many ride-along shifts as we can so that gives them that real-life experience.”

Overall, however, Waring said that despite the success in getting more applicants for police work in Phoenix, the numbers are still troubling.

He called the target of having 3,125 sworn officers “a fictitious number” because the city’s population has grown since that number of budgeted positions was set in 2020.

“I would say…the situation is even worse than we think,” he said. “On a per capita basis, things are getting worse.”

He said the council needs to set a new target for the total police force in Phoenix to “give our citizens a more realistic perspective.”