Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to the land use public safety and community development ki uh committee.

Yes, committee for May 22nd, 2025.

We'll begin with the Pledge of Allegiance.

So welcome.

We do not have quorum today.

Uh all the uh council member Kazemchak is under the weather.

Uh we don't yet see uh council member uh McShane, so we cannot approve our minutes.

But uh with that we'll move right on to our workshop item agenda.

And we're gonna have a presentation from the Frederick Police Department about recruitment and retention policies for the FPD, and I'm looking forward to this.

So welcome.

Thank you very much.

Uh Jason Lando, Chief of Police, and I'm here with Captain Aaron Lapp.

And I just want to acknowledge uh Captain Lapp uh put a significant amount of work into this PowerPoint presentation.

I know he was working um in his time off as well, so I just want to thank him for the work he he put into this, and we'll go ahead and get started.

Um who's advancing the slides?

Me?

Okay.

Okay.

Just a couple of our uh officers that are currently employed with the department out there every day doing great work.

This is uh just a quick snapshot of some of our sworn demographics.

Um and just to just to note, um, I know prior just prior to this meeting, Captain Lapp was doing uh um kind of an audit of this and found that um uh the numbers weren't exact this is a little bit outdated.

Um so if anything uh we're showing that the numbers are a little bit more favorable now uh in regard regarding recruitment and retention.

Um we don't have the uh the completely updated numbers today, uh, but I just don't want to uh don't take this particular slide as gospel.

We're tweaking the numbers a little bit due to some uh uh a recent audit of our system.

Likewise for our civilian demographics, you can see some of the numbers up there as well.

And I know you have this in the backup as well, and we can get you those updated numbers uh at some point before the week's over.

So I just wanted to touch a little bit up on some of the challenges uh to recruitment as you know.

Um, one of the things that we faced uh especially in the past few years is just the the societal view of policing.

I think things are getting better.

Uh the pendulum is swinging back.

Um, but you know, over the past few years with the the defund movement, and I just want to be very clear that I I'm thankful that we did not experience that uh sentiment here in Frederick uh nearly as much as other agencies around the country have seen.

Um but still when we look at recruiting new officers.

Um and I've shared before, you know, I have a little brother with with big brothers, big sisters.

I I've mentored him for the past eight years, and he he's gotten to tour all the police stations and and you know, see exactly what it's like to be a police officer.

And I've said to him, what do you what do you think about this?

Like, wouldn't it be cool for you to do this for your career?

And his response to me was, yeah, like everyone hates cops, and like I want to go in the automotive field.

And so, like the I I when I say societal view of the police, here's someone who has mentored a young kid for eight years, and he's gotten to see all of uh the ins and outs of policing, and he still wouldn't consider that because of the societal view on policing.

And so um that's something I think that weighs on all of us uh when we look at who we are recruiting and who we're you know who we're hiring, um, and we need to figure out a way as a community to um shine a light on policing and um make people or help people understand that it is an it's an amazing career and uh and figure out how we can get people more interested uh in it.

Um background investigations.

I wanted to touch on those.

So as you know, um we have to follow the Comar regulations.

So if we have a candidate that applies to FPD, and they've wanted to be a police officer their whole life, and this is their passion, and that you know, but there's something that comes up in their background, which we see very frequently.

Um even if we say, hey, as the Frederick Police Department, we're we would be willing to overlook this.

Um the state of Maryland says we won't certify this person if you hire them, and it puts us in a in a little bit of a quandary.

Um and I think a lot of times people will say to me, Hey, I know someone that applied to the police department, and they'd be a great cop.

You know, they're a great person in the community, they they they serve their church on the weekends, they do all this community outreach, and I look at their folder and in their background, there's something that will prohibit them from from becoming certified.

Uh and I just as much as I would love to maybe hire that person and mentor them and work with them to get them where they need to be, we can't hire someone that we can't certify.

Um and that's often that's it's tough for us to communicate that to the community sometimes without sharing sensitive information about someone's background.

So generational changes.

Um Aaron, do you want to touch on that?

Yeah, sure.

The the other two up there are so option options available.

There's just a lot more police jobs available.

Pretty much every agency has vacancies right now.

So when I got hired way back in 2006, um, you know, I was selected out of many, probably.

Nowadays there's a lot less to select from, and we see what makes it through the background process as the chief mentioned.

Uh generational changes, this is uh something we're seeing nowadays where younger people uh when they're entering the job force, they more value their personal time and not so much the career that they're choosing, and they're more apt to jump career to career or try something out for a short time and find out it doesn't fit their needs.

Uh luckily at FPD, we don't have a lot of people that leave FPD once they come here.