CLEVELAND — Amid the ongoing recruitment challenges faced by law enforcement agencies across the state, the Ohio State Highway Patrol is now allowing and actively recruiting lateral transfers for the first time in the agency’s history. The initiative will allow certified and qualifying officers currently working for other departments to transfer to OSHP without having to retake the 6-month cadet academy. Instead, lateral transfers will have to graduate from a condensed, 12-week academy training program.
On May 1, OSHP opened its enrollment for lateral transfers, a major break from tradition for the highway patrol. Historically, OSHP has been one of only a few agencies in the state that did not accept lateral transfers unless the applicant was willing to undergo the full academy program. Under the agency’s new lateral cadet program, applicants that have a current Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy (OPATA) certification and at least two years of continuous, full-time experience will be considered as a lateral cadet.
“We just decided to open up our recruitment processing for lateral transfers… which is something we have never done with the Ohio State Highway Patrol,” said Staff Sgt. Anetra Sims-Byrd of OSHP’s Office of Training, Recruitment and Diversity. “Really, it’s a recruitment tactic. We’ve gone back and forth about it the past couple of years. Once [Col. Charles Jones became OSHP’s superintendent], he decided, ‘let’s go ahead and try it because it’s never been tried before in our history. We don’t know how successful it’s going to be unless we try it.”
Prior to the recent recruitment crunch, which had been growing in recent years before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated it, OSHP would routinely log around 1,700 to 1,800 applicants per year, officials said. Last year, however, the number of applicants shrank to less than 1,200. Through the first four months of the year, Staff Sgt. Sims-Byrd said new applications were beginning to stabilize.
“It’s around the globe, ever since COVID and [the civil unrest in 2020],” Sims-Byrd said. “We’re going up and down. We have good moments — they don’t last very long, but they’re good — and then bad moments. We’re hoping that it starts to level out here in the next year, year and a half.”
Gary Wolske, a retired Garfield Heights police detective and current president of the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police, said the highway patrol’s decision to allow lateral transfers is both surprising and expected, given the ever-difficult challenge of recruiting.
A survey conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police found nearly eight in 10 agencies have reported difficulties with recruiting, and more than six of 10 agencies reported having too few qualified candidates.
The survey was conducted in 2019. It has grown substantially more difficult in the years since.
“Cleveland’s last graduating class was 17 people, but 180 left. Columbus had 31 in their class, but they had 195 leave. Places are offering signing bonuses, referral bonuses. They’re doing whatever they can,” Wolske said. “[OSHP] are just looking to jump on the same bandwagon as everybody else is and try to find folks wherever they can find folks. It’s just that difficult. When you have Mcdonald's and Target paying $15-$18 an hour, and you have some law enforcement agencies that are starting folks at that rate, well, ‘do I want to work at Mcdonald's or Target and not have a lot of risk?’”
Not only are law enforcement agencies struggling to compete in the broader job market, but they are having to more frequently compete against neighboring departments, some of which may offer substantially higher pay bands.
“I think the biggest problem with lateral transfers is people go where the money is,” Wolske said. “If you are looking at Cleveland or an inner-ring city, your salary is going to be much lower than the Westlakes and the Solons, and the Dublins that are surrounding our big cities. Folks are leaving like crazy.”
Under highway patrol’s lateral transfer program, cadets will earn an hourly rate of $31.19 per hour upon graduation, which amounts to a pre-tax annual salary of just under $65,000. Graduates will be placed at a post that is within 50 air miles of their home address.
Staff Sgt. Sims-Byrd said the abbreviated training academy would cover some aspects that are OSHP-specific.
“We took the curriculum that is currently in place for our troopers and see what we could scale down on because of the training and the experience that the officers will already bring to the table,” Sims-Byrd said. “There are a lot of [officers] out there that would like to be a part of our family. Things that were stopping people before were the longer academy and not wanting to go through the academy class again. Now that our academy class is shorter, those people that were already officers and wanted to be a state trooper, now is their chance.”
Although OSHP is accepting applications through the end of the month, Sims-Byrd said that the application window may be extended if demand warrants it.
“We’re recruiting many as we can get,” Sims-Byrd said. “If we have to run this class as 100, we’ll run it as 100.”
