Police officers are younger and less experienced. Why that matters in the field
Natalie Corona: 22 years old.
Tara O’Sullivan: 26 years old.
Of the last two police officers killed in the line of duty in the Sacramento region, one detail stands out: how extraordinarily young they were. Two women barely out of the training academy responding to common law enforcement calls — one a traffic accident, the other a domestic violence report — that ended in their deaths.
Corona was responding to a car accident on Jan. 10 in downtown Davis, when 48-year-old Kevin Douglas Limbaugh — armed with a semiautomatic handgun — rode up on a bicycle, emerged from the shadows and opened fire, police said. Limbaugh fired at firefighters and bystanders before he headed to his home, where he shot himself and died after an hours-long standoff with police.
Corona had only been on the force since July, and had finished her field training just the month before.
Police said O’Sullivan was ambushed Wednesday afternoon in north Sacramento’s Noralto neighborhood by Adel Sambrano Ramos, 45, who shot her with a rifle and as he paced the backyard for eight hours, firing at officers, before he was convinced to surrender.
A child development major at Sacramento State, O’Sullivan joined the Sacramento Police Academy in 2017 and the department just last year. She was two weeks away from the last phase of her training in which an officer would shadow O’Sullivan to evaluate whether she was ready to go on patrol on her own.
Police are still investigating how O’Sullivan ended up in a situation that lead to her death. Her age and lack of experience may have played no role in her killing. In Corona’s case, investigators and experts on police procedures found there wasn’t anything she could have done differently to protect herself from Limbaugh.
Some of those same experts say that if the investigation confirms that O’Sullivan was ambushed as well, there probably wasn’t much she could have done differently either.
“Those are ambushes. I don’t care if you have 50 years on or 30 years on (the force),” said Ed Obayashi, a police use of force expert and a Plumas County sheriff’s deputy. “There was no warning. No indicator. It could have happened to any of them.”
But throughout the country, law enforcement critics are questioning whether police officers are adequately trained to deal with the extreme stress of working in the field, where a proliferation of high-powered weapons makes every call potentially dangerous, and if less experienced officers are getting assigned to high-crime neighborhoods before they are fully ready.
While downtown Davis where Corona was shot hardly qualifies as a rough neighborhood, the north Sacramento neighborhood where O’Sullivan was killed has been battered by crime.
In the last year alone, police have taken reports of about 80 robberies and 120 aggravated assaults within a one-mile radius of the site of the shooting, according to police records maintained by LexisNexis.
Before joining the force, police and sheriff’s deputies in California are generally required to attend a six-month police academy, where they learn the basics of everything from forensic science, to use of force, to report writing.
“It’s very arduous and very thorough in making sure we’re contemporary with society’s needs, that we’re ensuring that we have a very open level of education with regards to different cultures, with different issues in society like the mentally ill and vulnerable populations,” said Citrus Heights Police Chief Ronald Lawrence, president of the California Police Chiefs Association.
That’s followed by 16 to 22 weeks of on-the-job training where rookie cops are partnered with a veteran officer who’s “trained to be a coach, a mentor and a guide,” Lawrence said.
But critics say just a few months of training is not nearly enough to have an officer ready for the vast responsibilities and dangers they face.
“My biggest criticism of my profession is we’re not trained properly,” said Andrew Scott III, a former police chief of Boca Raton, Fla. and law enforcement consultant. “We’re not trained enough. A high-school educated kid can come out of high school, go to the police academy and become a police officer and have one of the most powerful jobs in the nation. ... Something’s wrong with that picture.”
Younger, less experienced officers pose a particular challenge for the Sacramento Police Department. Almost 200, or nearly one-third, of the city’s roughly 660 sworn officers have fewer than five years experience, according to a Sacramento Bee analysis of data from the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.
About 60 police officers have fewer than two years of experience.
Like most cities, the department sharply curtailed hiring during the last recession and its aftermath. Just 55 of its officers have between five and 10 years experience from being hired during that period.
As the economy improved, there was a rush to hire officers to fill gaps amid a wave of older officers retiring. Other cities in surrounding communities sought to hire many officers at the same time.
Sacramento police didn’t return messages from The Bee for this story.
But the department — which, for years, paid less than most neighboring jurisdictions — has lost experienced officers to the suburbs, and those officers were largely replaced by newer recruits.
“The numbers ... in Sacramento are not at all inconsistent with what we’re hearing around the country from agencies of all sizes,” said Jonathan Wender, a 20-year police veteran and law enforcement training consultant from Seattle.
Nationally, a wave of cops from the Baby Boomer generation are retiring — combined with widespread shortages of qualified candidates to fill the depleted ranks — have put more inexperienced officers on patrol, Wender said.
“There are lots and lots of new officers on the street and in many places, the supervisors are also inexperienced, so there’s a perfect storm,” Wender said.
Younger officers, greater risks?
The experience levels of the two officers in the Stephon Clark shooting in Sacramento last year factored into the national debate over whether they should have fired 20 rounds at Clark, killing him in the backyard of his grandmother’s Meadowview neighborhood home.
The officers were responding to a report that a man in the neighborhood had been smashing car windows. They said they mistook a cell phone in Clark’s hand for a gun.
Officer Terrence Mercadal previously served in the Olive Branch Police Department in Olive Branch, Miss., before joining the Sacramento Police Department in 2015 after a short stint as a police officer trainee in Oakland. Officer Jared Robinet joined the Sacramento Police Department in 2014.
Experts such as Obayashi say young officers are more likely to chase suspects, which factored into the Sacramento Police Department’s decision to adopt a foot-pursuit policy after the Clark shooting. That policy encourages officers not to run after suspects unless there’s probable cause he or she committed a crime or there’s an immediate danger to the public.
Criminal justice experts have been examining whether younger officers are more likely to put themselves in harm’s way. And there is a growing body of evidence that younger officers are more likely to use force.
The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism organization that reports on criminal justice issues, found in 2016 that rookie officers “are cannon fodder” while veterans police the safer neighborhoods. The publication cited a 2008 study of 186 officer-involved shootings found that younger officers are more likely to use force on the job. A database of police shootings compiled by the Chicago Tribune also showed that the average Chicago officer who opened fire had about six years less experience than the department as a whole.
Experts such as Obayashi, the use of force expert from California, dispute the notion that young officers are more likely to fall victim to violence themselves.
Obayashi said that if anything, their inexperience makes them more cautious.
“Younger officers are much more vigilant when it comes to responding to calls or traffic stops or whatever because they are brand new,” Obayashi said. That mindset starts at the police academy where, he said, “the most scrutinized aspect, performance-wise, of any cadet, any trainee, in the academy is officer safety.”
New recruits such as O’Sullivan also are constantly being scrutinized and evaluated by their field training officer for whether they’re mindful of the dangers on patrol.
“Officer safety is always, always the primary area the (field training officer) is focusing on for obvious reasons,” Obayashi said. “The last thing we want is for an officer to get hurt out there.”
The national wave of younger officers joining the ranks of police forces hasn’t translated into a surge of officers killed on the job.
Fifty-two officers were shot and killed nationwide last year, according to the latest figures from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. That’s similar to the rates in which officers were shot and killed over the last decade. An average of 57 officers shot and killed each year during the 2000s.
The memorial’s statistics don’t break down the officers who were shot by their ages. But last year, the average age was 41 for the 144 officers who were killed in the line of duty in 2018 from all causes. The officers who died on the job had on average 12 years of service.
‘A different conversation than 20 years ago’
Experts said the wave of new, young officers coming into the job encounter stress, criticism and scrutiny in far greater measure than rookie officers faced even a decade ago.
Some of the pressure comes from the political arena.
After the Clark shooting and several other recent controversial shootings of unarmed black men across the country, lawmakers have been debating officer use-of-force standards and training. In California, a pending bill would change the standards of what constitutes appropriate use of deadly force.
There’s also more of a chance that any slip up an officer makes will be caught on camera.
During tense moments, officers’ behavior is being filmed by body cameras issued by a growing number of departments. Bystanders are recording them on their cell phones, and posting the raw footage of confrontations or use of force incidents, necessary or otherwise, on social media.
“A lot of officers and their trainers and their supervisors are afraid of being the next YouTube sensation,” said Wender, the Seattle police training consultant.
What’s more, he said training officers are so worried about a high-profile mistake, they’re doing less of the sorts of proactive policing — “looking for bad guys” — than in years past, Wender said.
“There is a top-to-bottom reluctance to do that because no one wants to get in trouble,” he said. “What that leads to is a throttling of a development of experience.”
Meanwhile, police are increasingly being met with hostility while on patrol in many neighborhoods.
That happened this week in the north Sacramento neighborhood where O’Sullivan was shot. Footage uploaded to social media and shared on Twitter by a local journalist featured unidentified women heckling officers stringing crime scene tape around the area where the shooting occurred.
“Whatever officer gettin’ shot, y’all need to be,” one woman says in the clip. “Y’all need to be.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” an officer replies.
“You’re welcome, you punk,” the woman continues. “You’re welcome, you little bastard. You’re welcome, you little bastard. You little coward. Take that little gun off. I’ll whip your little butt.”
That’s the sort of behavior that has Eugene O’Donnell wondering why anyone — rookie or otherwise — would want to be a cop, especially in California.
“Anybody who pays attention to the debate and the dialogue wouldn’t want to have any part of policing at this point,” said O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer who’s now a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
He said Sacramento has become “ground zero” for police hostilities since the Clark shooting. O’Donnell said he sympathizes with any new officer looking to join that department — or any other in California, where he said police chiefs face political pressure to blame street officers if they have to make a controversial life-or-death decision.
“Inexperience is an issue, but that’s a different conversation than 20 years ago,” he said. Back then, he said, “Cops had their sea legs. When they stepped out of the car, they had reasonable certainty that they were authority figures who would be supported if they acted reasonably. That no longer exists.”
Three dozen new officers were sworn into the Sacramento Police Department on Thursday in a ceremony of mixed emotions. Just 24 hours prior, they had lined the walls of the hospital as nurses wheeled O’Sullivan’s body out, new Officer Berlinda Cato said.
Rookie Officer Thom Panen joined the police academy for sense of fraternity and greater purpose he found during his four years in the Marine Corps. He and his family have made their peace with the risks of his job, he said.
“They understand that this is what I really want to do. They understand that this is what’s in my soul; this is what’s in my blood,” Panen said. “And as long as I’m doing it with a good heart, I’m going to be okay.”
Lawrence, the Citrus Heights police chief, said it comes down to building trust with the communities that officers serve. And to keep morale up, Lawrence said, officers need to know they have the support of their commanders.
“I do it as often as I can and as sincerely as I can,” Lawrence said. “My officers know their police chief is supporting what they do. As long as their actions are lawful and the right thing to do, then I’ve got their back. If they step out of line I’m going to hold them accountable, and they know that. But I make sure they know how appreciated they are and make sure they continue to keep their heads up.”
Molly Sullivan contributed to this story.
This story was originally published June 21, 2019 at 11:00 AM with the headline "Police officers are younger and less experienced. Why that matters in the field."