SALEM, Ore. — For years now, the Portland Police Bureau has struggled to get enough officers on the street to be anywhere close to fully staffed. They've cited a few reasons for this, including high turnover and a general slump in recruitment interest. But another major reason cited is that even when the agency does successfully hire on new officers, they join a long queue for training at Oregon's one central public safety academy.
That problem isn't unique to PPB, of course. Every law enforcement agency in the state sends its recruits to the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training (DPSST) academy in Salem, which means they've all shared the same months-long backlog for getting officers trained.
But in June, Gov. Tina Kotek and DPSST Director Phil Castle proudly announced that the backlog had been eliminated. At its peak, they said, recruits were waiting seven months to get in. The story of how they beat the backlog is one of both innovation and determination.
RELATED: Police departments are hiring, but Oregon's only police academy has a 6 month-long wait to get in
Upheavals in policing
The DPSST academy is located on a 237-acre campus just south of Salem. At the academy, new officers learn how to simultaneously drive quickly and use a hand-held radio, how to safely pull someone over, and how to think about the many facets of "use of force."
For years, the academy had a good handle on how many students for their four-month class. As Castle recently told The Story's Pat Dooris, the academy was equipped to keep up with about a 10% turnover rate in policing for a population of roughly 5,500 law enforcement officers in Oregon.
"Although we train all the disciplines, that is by far our largest population that we service," Castle said. "So, we were designed to train about 10% of them every two years. That means our facilities, the templates that we build, our staffing model, all of that was built around that turnover rate, which was normal and held for quite some time. So, the average law enforcement officer would stay in their career from 15 to 20 years before moving on to something else or retiring."
Every two years, the academy expected to have about 640 students, which worked out to 16 classes every two years, with 40 students per class. That underwent major upheaval around 2020.
"When we went through the pandemic, you know, George Floyd, policing reform and those things, and the culture dramatically changed around policing, that changed the turnover rate dramatically and dropped as low as 5-7 years retention, which pushed the turnover rate close to 25% — so over double what this academy was designed to train," Castle said.
Predictably, the surge in turnover and the sudden need for agencies to step up recruitment meant that more recruits were being sent to the DPSST academy. Agencies went on a hiring spree: In 2022, 636 students were referred to the academy, which was equipped to handle about half that — just 320 per year.
As the recruits piled up, awaiting their turn in training, the delay grew. A wait time that was once a few weeks to a month or two grew substantially, up to that seven-month peak.
An academy at capacity
Castle, hired on to head the academy in 2023, gathered a team to brainstorm solutions.
"We kind of took a really quick and hard look at this facility, right? And we started considering all kinds of things, like, do we need to go rent someplace ... can we build, you know, big, quick tents to put up on the facility or what-have-you? Or is there a different way of templating our courses and looking at our staffing models a little bit differently?"
The previous academy that Castle had worked at would train 256 students in a single class, all taking the same course simultaneously. They had nine classrooms all running through the same curriculum. Oregon's DPSST was not so straightforward.
"It was pretty easy to figure out how to staff something like that up," Castle said, referring to his earlier gig. "This academy (DPSST) runs multiple disciplines at one time, and we run four basic police courses all at the same time in different segments. So, you'll have one start 30 days later, another will start 30 days later, another (will) start ... so you'll have a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior classes all overlapping, all competing for the same venues on our academy, the same space, the same instructors and so forth."
Oregon's DPSST simply doesn't have the space to run all its classes simultaneously, like the academy from Castle's previous experience, resulting in that staggered approach.
There was also the problem of not only having too many students, but too few instructors. For years, the academy relied on active police officers "loaned" by their departments for teaching stints at the academy. But with turnover spiking, those departments suddenly needed all hands on deck to police their own communities. As a result, the academy had more students and fewer instructors, something Castle described as a "perfect storm."
The fix is in
What they'd been doing simply wasn't going to work in this new paradigm, so Castle and his team started thinking outside the box.
"We figured there was a way to template this a little bit differently, where we could scale a course from 40 to 60, so we could add 20 students more into a particular class and focus on one of the largest agencies in the state, which is the Oregon State Police," Castle explained.
Oregon State Police make up the second-largest police agency in the state after the Portland Police Bureau. They also have their own "training cadre," Castle said, housed at DPSST.
"The Oregon State Police take a lot of slots out of our regular training population, so we figured if we could separate them off into their own separate class, get help from the state police to staff that class, then it would take a load off of the Academy-proper, a load off our instructors," Castle explained. "And you know, we could train more at that time, so we combine those two strategies together — and the governor's office was extremely supportive, as well as the legislature, and we were able to put a package together that added three 60-person courses on top of what we were already teaching, and three total OSP partnership courses, which the second of those started today."
To summarize, DPSST expanded each policing class by 20 students, added three extra classes on top of their pre-existing schedule, and broke out OSP to teach their own courses, with three classes of 40 students each. It was enough to start getting ahead of the curve.
RELATED: Kotek holds signing ceremony for bills on ghost guns, fentanyl and Oregon's police training backlog
Even though they came up with a way to get on top of the backlog, Castle said that it's not an ideal way to run the academy.
"It was tough, and I like to tell everybody we're popping the rivets right off the sides of these buildings with as many people as we had on campus ... at one given time, I think we peaked at around 350 students on this campus at one time," Castle said. "And at 237-acres, it doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a lot of students, and we were pretty creative, the staff was amazingly creative at how to make this happen.
"We were using all kinds of... every space we could to train. We did a lot outside training whenever we could. We retrofitted some classrooms to make them bigger. We knocked down a couple of walls so we could fit more people in classrooms. We were very, very creative about when and how we conducted training and we also had to run training later into the evening. And I kind of explained it like a movie theater, you know — you run X amount of shows during the day, and we had to add a third showing. Basically, that's a night show, right? But it was the same training, same quality, you know, same ratio of trainers to students, that kind of thing. We're just running longer."
The Oregon Legislature gave the academy an extra $9 million to hire instructors and fund those extra classes. With the expanded program up and running, the wait for DPSST is now 90 days or less, which academy leaders said is back to normal.