Mayor Daniel Lurie took to social media this week to laud an important milestone in his plan to rebuild the San Francisco Police Department: the largest academy class since 2018. “We are on the move,” he said in a video posted to Instagram celebrating the 55 recruits in Class 285. “We are going to refill the ranks of our police department.”

What Lurie did not mention is that a big class doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of new cops. The most recent class to graduate, Class 283, began with 41 recruits last spring, but by graduation day, Jan. 6 — two days before Lurie was inaugurated — only 12 remained.

The department says it needs 485 more sworn officers to fill its ranks, and Lurie campaigned on a promise that he would hire them, a goal many of his rivals echoed. But it won’t be easy. Class 283’s shrunken graduating class raises questions about whether the city’s machinery for producing officers is up to the task — or utterly broken.

“An attrition rate like that would give me pause to look at the entire system of hiring and academy training to find out why,” said retired Cmdr. Rich Corriea, who ran the academy from 2007 to 2009. 

Officers who spoke with The Standard identified a number of problems with the department’s pipeline. The pool of applicants interested in police careers, in San Francisco and elsewhere, is dramatically smaller than it once was. The process for vetting those applicants takes months, disqualifies many on questionable grounds, yet somehow serves up cadets wholly unprepared for the physical and psychological demands of training, much less actual police work. 

And the culture of the academy drives some would-be officers on the cusp of joining the force to walk away altogether. 

It wasn’t all that long ago that SFPD jobs were in high demand. One former officer who joined the force in the 1980s said he had to sleep on the sidewalk outside the Hall of Justice to get a chance to apply for the department, in a line that snaked down the block and around the corner of Bryant Street. But a lot has changed since then.

Most departments saw a drop in potential recruits following national backlash against law enforcement due to the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in 2020.

Annual applications to the SFPD tanked to 1,586 in 2021. By 2023, they had recovered to 3,008 — but that was still less than half the applications submitted in 2014.

“It’s not the days where we can sit back like we used to and get eight, nine thousand applications and take our time,” Deputy Chief Peter Walsh said at a hearing on staffing in May. “This is a battle to get the best people for an amazing profession.”

A generous union contract, a $5,000 sign-on bonus, and six-figure starting pay have failed to draw the numbers of recruits the department saw historically. 

It’s not a problem that can be solved with just money, Walsh admitted at a hearing. “If you give us a billion dollars tomorrow, it doesn’t give us police officers the next day.”

Corriea thinks the department isn’t doing enough to widen that initial applicant pool.

“In some ways, they do recruiting the same way they always have,” he said — with stale advertising and visits on the college Career Day circuit. “It has to be a revolution in how you reach out to people.”

Once applications are in, getting to the academy is a months-long process that involves drug tests, a polygraph, written and physical exams, and an extensive background check, which involves going into the personal, financial, legal, and romantic details of recruits’ lives. 

Applicants interviewed by The Standard said the process took anywhere from four months to nearly a year — faster than other law enforcement agencies they had applied for. Still, in an effort to speed things up, the SFPD last year began hiring more former officers to run background checks.

According to the department, from November 2022 to March 2024, just 12% of those who were backgrounded made it to the academy. That figure implies a rigorous process that weeds out all those unsuited to a career with the police — physically, emotionally, ethically, or otherwise — and yields candidates with a strong chance of becoming capable officers. 

However, SFPD applicants are frequently disqualified for reasons that some policing experts consider outdated or irrelevant to the requirements of the job. While most departments ask applicants if they have used drugs recently, SFPD will disqualify them for any use, however long ago. A current officer said the department still bars people who have smoked pot a certain number of times, despite the fact that it’s legal in California. “The drug thing is the big one,” he said. 

Yulanda Williams, a retired officer and former president of Officers for Justice, said she told Lurie in a phone call last week that the department’s idea of who is a model recruit and how they are trained need to change. 

“The bottom line is that the expectations are too high,” she said. Women and people unable to do a certain number of pull-ups used to be barred from the force, too. “The idea that they aren’t cut out is subjective.”

Yet the experience of the few applicants who make it into the academy suggests that, in some respects, the admissions process is failing to screen out those who are patently unfit for police work and stand little chance of making it through the program. 

Academy Class 283 had recruits from all walks of life, from former members of the military to civilians, just out of high school to middle age. Some had failed out of earlier academy classes and were making their second or third attempt to graduate. 

Recruits face a grueling and confusing introduction from Day One, with officers yelling orders, barking at the newbies about how to tuck in their shirts and shine their shoes, and criticizing failed attempts at saluting or addressing higher-ups. The physical, psychological, and mental stress begins immediately and does not let up. 

Some recruits who did not graduate from recent classes told The Standard they were driven out not by the physical or emotional stresses, but by the culture of the academy, which teaches them to be cogs in a paramilitary machine that sees civilians as the enemy — a perspective reflected in some of the training materials.

“Close to the end, I started looking at the general public like they are bad,” said one recruit who dropped out after realizing “this whole process isn’t going to make you a good police officer.” 

“People want to do the right thing and help the public, and they pump you with how horrible the streets are and how you could die.”

Predictably, perhaps, many active and former police officers were dismissive when asked about candidates’ negative experience of the academy. Several described recruits from recent classes as weak physically and unprepared psychologically. 

Some recruits agree with that assessment. One failed member of Class 283 said a number of his classmates “just didn’t know what they were getting into.” Physical standards for admission seemed lax: “I was shocked at how many recruits were dying at 10 pushups.” 

While pushup tests are easy to administer, mental and emotional toughness is harder to quantify. It’s a longstanding maxim of police academies everywhere that recruits must be pushed to their extremes to expose those who will break down when confronted with the stress of a physical confrontation or shootout. 

One recent graduate said most people who didn’t make it through the academy couldn’t handle the stress even if they had the driving, shooting, and physical skills. “It wasn’t that anyone didn’t want to be a cop,” he said.

Accidental shootings by police are frequently the result of psychologically unfit officers who panic under stress, said former officer Harry Soulette. When they wash out of the academy, it’s a good thing, he said: “The problem isn’t the training; the problem is the applicants.”

But an academy is a place not just of testing, but of teaching. Barring a revolution that expands the applicant pool, a different approach to training — cultivating toughness rather than simply disqualifying those who don’t already possess it — may be the only fix available to the SFPD to get the officers it wants. 

“It’s a training school, and that’s what it should be,” said retired officer Williams. “They should be trying to do everything they can to keep you in the academy.”

The SFPD acknowledges that its pipeline is rusty. “Being a police officer is challenging, and we have high standards for our recruits,” the department said in a statement. “We are also closely evaluating our academy to see if there are areas where we can improve our retention.”

San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey said hiring and retention of officers will be a priority for him as he heads up the board’s public safety committee. “I want a regular hearing on the status of how we are doing,” he said. 

Dorsey agreed that Class 283’s attrition rate is high compared to previous classes in 2024, which had 28 and 22 starting recruits and much higher graduation rates. He hopes the city can find ways to reduce it with additional training, such as supporting recruits who have less urban driving experience.

“I would like to think there are things we are doing … to make sure we are being more successful,” he said.

The 12 recruits who did graduate are now in field training, and the next class, 284, is set to graduate in May and has already lost just over 20% of its recruits, according to two sources with knowledge of the headcount. But if Class 283 is any indication, quantity is no substitute for quality, and larger cohorts won’t necessarily result in a larger SFPD.