The number everyone quotes is one in ten. American policing is running at about 91 percent of authorized staffing, and almost every conversation about that number turns into a recruiting conversation. The conversation nobody schedules is about what the shortage is doing one level up, in the place where sergeants come from.
When the middle of a department empties out, somebody still has to run the shift. So, agencies hand stripes to whoever is left standing, then act surprised when the building stops trusting itself. A 2026 analysis from RespondCapture found that the departure of experienced supervisors is forcing the rapid promotion of less seasoned officers, and that the rush compounds the risk of misconduct. Sixty-five percent of agencies have cut services or eliminated specialized units because of staffing, up from 25 percent as recently as 2019. We track response times, vacancy rates, academy classes. Nobody tracks what it costs to put the wrong person in charge of a shift at 2am.
Every organization gets a promotion wrong on occasion. Police work has no monopoly on this. Most of the time the process uses a lot of information and lands on the right pick. But when the wrong one comes through, the questions in the hallway are always the same. How did we get here? Were we asking the right people about this candidate, or did somebody’s buddy just get promoted?
What command staff underestimates is what happens next. Trust erodes. Hardworking people feel undervalued. And morale does not shift evenly. It shifts hardest when the people who disagree with the pick are natural leaders themselves, the ones who already have the ear of the department. Most of them will not say a word in the building. They do not have to. The list said it for them, and everyone else is watching those officers to decide how to feel about it.
Officers already know all of this. Spend any time where cops talk to each other and the promotion complaints have a shape: the process changed mid-stream when the wrong person was winning, the yes men moved to the front of the line, the specialized assignment went to whoever knew the right lieutenant. Police1’s What Cops Want survey found only 30 percent of officers agreed that their agency’s leadership understands the day-to-day realities of patrol. That number was not built at press conferences. It was built one promotion list at a time.
I work inside an agency that decided to attack this from the other end, before anyone gets promoted at all.
We instituted leadership principles and leadership classes for every employee. Sworn and professional staff. Not the sergeant’s list, not the command college cohort. Everyone. The professional staff part matters more than it sounds. When leadership is only taught to people on a promotion track, everyone else in the building learns that leading is a rank instead of a responsibility, and they act accordingly. The goal is that nobody waits until promotion to start leading. It is the most effective way I have seen to avoid promoting people who are not ready, because by the time a board convenes, the agency has already watched the candidate lead. Nobody in that room is guessing.
That answers the staffing-crisis objection too. Yes, shortages sometimes force fast promotions. But if the system is built the right way, tenure does not matter as much as we pretend it does. A written test with selection from the highest score measures preparation for the test, not preparation for the shift. Teach people to lead before you give them rank, and a fast promotion stops being a gamble.
The same culture buys you something no policy manual can. Officers who step in laterally and stop other officers from behaving in an unacceptable manner, without waiting for rank to authorize them. Accountability starts running peer to peer, which is where most misconduct either dies early or takes root. Pride keeps people accountable better than any general order I have seen, and pride grows where people are trusted to lead before they are ordered to. So, how do we get there?
First, move leadership development before rank instead of after it. If you only develop leaders after you promote them, your promotion system is a lottery. First-line leadership development should be a budgeted mandate for the whole organization, not an elective reward for people who already made a list. Most agencies already spend this money. They just spend it late, on the newly promoted, after the habits are set. The Police Executive Research Forum has an entire Critical Issues report on staffing innovation. The innovation the middle of the org chart needs is a chief willing to spend development dollars on people who do not have stripes yet.
Second, rebuild the board so the buddy system cannot survive it. A promotion board that works is not a test and a selection. It is testing, interviews, and true evaluations, including from peers, with multiple layers of rating and input from multiple levels of the organization. Somewhere in that process, someone has to ask the question no written exam can score: would you want to work for this person? The buddy system survives on narrow input, one or two senior voices who know the candidate socially. Widen the input across ranks and it starves. Harvard Business Review’s recent work on why innovations fail to scale calls the people who carry change across organizational boundaries bridgers, and Police1 has made the same argument for mid-level supervisors in policing. A scantron has never once found one of them.
A promotion list can be legal, scored, and defensible, and still be wrong. Everyone on shift knows it before the ink dries. The agencies that hold their people through this staffing crisis will not be the ones with the biggest signing bonuses. They will be the ones where an officer can look at the last five promotions and see the system working. Start teaching leadership to people who do not have rank yet, and put the question that matters in front of the people who would have to follow them.
Sources
RespondCapture, “Police Shortage 2026: Why Hiring Gains Still Aren’t Solving the Staffing Crisis”: https://www.respondcapture.com/insights/police-shortage-2026-why-hiring-gains-still-aren-t-solving-the-staffing-crisis
National Policing Institute, “Six Trends to Watch in American Policing in 2026”: https://www.policinginstitute.org/infocus/six-trends-to-watch-in-american-policing-in-2026/
Police1, “What 84% of police officers want from their leaders” (What Cops Want survey): https://www.police1.com/what-cops-want/what-84-of-police-officers-want-from-their-leaders
Police Executive Research Forum, “Responding to the Staffing Crisis: Innovations in Recruitment and Retention”: https://www.policeforum.org/assets/RecruitmentRetention.pdf
Police1, “Mid-level supervisors are the bridge for police innovation”: https://www.police1.com/police-leader-playbook/Mid-level-supervisors-are-the-bridge-for-police-innovation
Harvard Business Review, “Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale” (as referenced by Police1)