In his State of the County address in March, Hawaii Island Mayor Mitch Roth set a goal of filling all vacant officer positions in the Hawaii Police Department by June 2025.
“We have made significant progress through a new rolling recruiting model and have seen an influx of potential new officers since we switched to this model,” Roth said during his speech at the West Hawaii Civic Center in Kailua-Kona.
According to Hawaii County Police Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz, as of Thursday the department had 484 county-funded sworn officer positions, and there were 433 officers on the roster, leaving 51 vacancies to fill.
“That does count the recruits I currently have in training,” Moszkowicz said. “I have a class of 16… that graduates in October, and I have another class of 16 that is in field training.”
Moszkowicz said that when he was hired as chief in January 2023, there were only two 10-day application periods a year for prospective officers, in April and October.
“Then you would apply and then the window would close,” the chief said. “They would take the several hundred people who applied and determine who meets the minimum requirements. Then they would give everyone a written test, hundreds of people. Then, people who passed the written test would be invited to the agility test. Everyone in that group went through the process together. So from the time you took the exam in April or October to the time you were hired, it was about nine months.”
According to Moszkowicz, the long period between application and hiring caused a large number of qualified candidates to look for other jobs or lose interest in becoming civil servants.
Moszkowicz said since mid-May 2023, the county has been accepting applications for police officers online 24/7.
“Think of it as an assembly line, where every month people take the written test and the agility test,” he said. “And in the same month, people from the previous month go through their background checks. And last month’s people are taking the final steps before a conditional offer.
“So every three or four months, we’ve trained enough people who are qualified and receive final offers, so we start a recruiting class every four months. But the changes in the process have taken us from classes of five or six to classes of 23 and 17, and we will probably be looking to hire 18 to 20 by mid-July.”
Another change is in the way background investigations are conducted.
Most pre-hire investigations used to be conducted by the department’s Office of Professional Standards, which is the internal affairs unit, with help from the Criminal Investigation Division, which, Moszkowicz noted, diverted some of the attention of those officers. ‘ primary duties.
Currently, background checks are conducted by five part-time civilian investigators, mostly retired police officers, who receive funding from vacant positions within the department. These part-time investigators not only perform background checks on officers, but also on operators, other civilian employees and volunteers within the department.
‘That helps us level the workflow internally, because we don’t have 50 or 60 background investigations to do all at once. We do 10, 12 or 15 a month,” Moszkowicz said. “As a result of this, we found that we could complete those investigations much more quickly. We had a backlog of 40 or 50 investigations when they started, and now there is no backlog.
“That change in the process allows people to complete the process much faster and much more efficiently for us, which makes sense because now we can retain them in the job market because they are still interested in the job. . So the time now from the written test to the final offer is about four months, five months. And we will submit those final offers before class starts.”
Additionally, hired recruits now have the opportunity to work within the department before their recruiting class begins, as “police services officers,” the chief said.
“We’re hiring some in mid-June, before the July class,” Moszkowicz said. “They’re not doing recruiting stuff, but there are other administrative and logistical things that the department does all the time, and we’re using these extra hands to help us do those things. They get used to our culture and we get to know them a little. Ideally, they develop friendships or mentorships with people in the department before starting the recruiting class.
“So once they start, it’s not zero to 100; They are already up to date. They will meet some of the staff who will train them and what part of the physical training is like.
“I think we had six of the 100th recruit class that started as police service officers, and we still have those six recruits. We have only lost one recruit from that class.”
The chief said there will always be retirements, resignations and other changes of officials in the department, but expressed confidence that vacant positions can be filled by the deadline mentioned in the mayor’s speech.
“I was the one who told him he could do it,” Moszkowicz said and laughed. “I was basically repeating my promise. So based on the success we saw in the first two or three classes (we went from having two classes a year with nine people to seven people), with the class starting next month, I will probably have hired 60 people. officers in the last year.”
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