Mar. 20—As the Reading Police Department's primary recruiter, Lt. Lance Lillis' calendar is filled most weeks with career fairs at schools and institutions within the city and beyond — far beyond.

As part of his mission to promote his department as a wonderful career opportunity for students, Lillis, who is the department's community response coordinator, has visited Penn State University campuses from Berks to Schuylkill Haven to Hazleton.

He's traveled as far as Mansfield, just south of the New York state line and about 160 miles from Reading, to recruit Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania (formerly Mansfield University) criminal justice students.

Locally, Lillis and some of his Reading police colleagues recently set up a recruitment table at a Reading Royals hockey game at the Santander Arena. Two days earlier, the officers and representatives of other Berks County police departments were at Alvernia University's career fair at the main campus in southwest Reading.

Lillis has also been making the rounds at job fairs. He posts his activities on the department's Facebook page.

The Reading Police Department is taking extraordinary measures to encourage men and women to take the written civil service test out of necessity in a difficult environment for police officer recruitment.

"It's been more of a challenge the past few years," Reading Police Chief Richard Tornielli said.

Nationally, news coverage involving police abusing their authority, including the killings of unarmed Black men, has tarnished the image of law enforcement officers.

"A lot of things have happened in the country," Tornielli said. "You can go back to Ferguson (Missouri), the incident there. Obviously the George Floyd incident. It's made recruiting police officers more difficult. And there's a lot of challenges for police officers these days."

Two decades ago, when Tornielli and his contemporaries were applying for the job of police officer on the Reading force, close to 400 others would be taking the exam at the same time for a shot at a few openings. Fewer than 100 showed up the last time the test was given in 2022.

The civil service test is the first of several steps in the process of hiring a police officer with no prior training in Pennsylvania. Other cities, including Philadelphia, are facing severe police-staffing shortages due to officer retirements and a dwindling pool of applicants.

The Reading Police Civil Service Commission recently offered its latest written test at Alvernia University. To encourage more people to sit for the test, city officials dropped the $35 registration fee for the exam.

Anyone who is at least 20 1/2 years old and a U.S. citizen was eligible to take the test.

Officials said about 60 people showed up.

Tornielli said the department expects it will need to hire at least 10 police officers early this summer to fill vacancies. But those hired won't be ready to go out on street patrol on their own for nearly a year from their date of hire.

Those who pass the test must successfully complete a physical fitness test, a background check and a psychological exam before being added to the hiring list. Hired cadets receive pay and benefits while attending the Reading Police Academy for six months.

Following the academy, rookie officers undergo 12 to 15 weeks of on-the-job training in which they're paired with a field training officer.

The lag between hiring and readiness as a full-fledged police officer is why recruitment is a year-round process.

"One of the things we're doing," Tornielli said, "is trying to get out there and really sell the profession, sell the benefits of doing this kind of work and what we have to offer."

What Reading offers that small departments in the suburbs or rural areas cannot match are abundant opportunities for specialization.

Lillis said he uses his own background and career as hooks when he talks to students about the opportunities that exist within his department.

He usually talks to criminal justice majors, but he'll jump at the chance to talk to any college senior about going into the field.

"Our department, what's nice about it, is we have specialty units such as the bomb squad," he said. "We have K-9, we have criminal investigations, we have vice investigations. We have a major tech (evidence unit).

"So I try to use that as a selling point. There are opportunities they're going to get in a department of our size as opposed to, let's say, a 10-man department. If you think you want to be a police officer, this department is a great place to be."

Also, thanks to Reading's recent emergence from the confines of the Act 47 state program for financially distressed cities, Reading offers a much more competitive salary than it has over the past decade, as well as pension and other benefits that are hard to top anywhere, Tornielli said.

The department was losing officers it hired and trained after a few years on the job to suburban departments that offered much higher pay. The new police contract that included significant raises has curtailed the exodus, Tornielli said.

The salary for a Reading police officer starts at $59,695 for someone with no experience and tops out at $85,278. A newly hired officer is able to reach the top step in the pay scale with only five full years of service.

"This administration has really put an emphasis, especially coming out of Act 47, of trying to do what they could in terms of the pay and restoring some of the pension benefits we lost in Act 47," Tornielli said.

Not just in Reading

Even large suburban police departments are seeing a decline in applicants despite generous pay and benefits.

"We've experienced shortages for individuals looking to enter into the field of law enforcement, even with a salary and benefits package we feel is extremely competitive," Cumru Township Police Chief Madison Winchester said.

The 2023 starting base pay for a Cumru patrolman with no experience is $70,275 a year. With predetermined step increases, a patrolman's annual base pay climbs to a maximum of $104,112 under the current contract.

Winchester, who started his career with the Reading Police Department in 1998, said there were just shy of 100 applicants for Cumru's 2017 civil service police exam, the first that was administered after he was hired as the township police chief.

"This last test we administered, in 2022, there were 23 applicants," he said.

The 29-member department is starting to ramp up recruitment efforts, Winchester said, because it has not received the number of applicants needed to maintain a robust list of qualified candidates from which to hire.

A rule of thumb in police hiring, Winchester explained, is you can expect to lose nearly 50% of applicants at each step in the screening process: background check, physical fitness test, psychological evaluation and police academy.

That's not a concern in a field of hundreds of applicants, but it's a potential problem with a pool of only two dozen, he said.

Winchester said that with so many departments chasing fewer applicants, those considering law enforcement careers have been known to compare contracts for the most lucrative salaries and benefit packages.

Pulling experienced officers

The Exeter Township Police Department, which is the second-largest police department in Berks, recently hired five officers.

Some large suburban departments have the luxury of attracting experienced officers from urban departments.

Of the five officers recently hired by Exeter, only two are rookies.

Exeter, which has 37 officers, draws talent from various departments because of its highly competitive salary and good reputation, said Sgt. Sean Fullerton, department public information officer.

"We're lucky we're able to pull from different agencies and different states," Fullerton said, noting one of the new officers had worked for the New York Police Department.

The starting rate for an Exeter patrol officer with no experience is $71,504. After seven full years of service, a patrolman's pay tops out at $108,566 under the current contract.

Members of the Exeter force help with recruiting by the professional way in which they handle themselves, Fullerton said.

"We want to be attractive," he said. "That is part of our job, to showcase our department in the best way to garner that interest."

Like other departments, Exeter has experienced a downward trend in the number of people taking the civil service exam, he said. Around 100 people showed up for the exam when it was given last year, about half as many as the previous test.

That's a potential issue given that the department faces future shortages due to the potential retirements of close to half of the force within the next five years, Fullerton said.

Difficult time

The Eastern Berks Regional Police Department has struggled to reach its full complement of 19 officers since the department was formed in 2020 through the merger of the Boyertown and Colebrookdale Township forces, Chief Barry Leatherman said.

The department launched into the process of hiring two officers to reach the target of 14 full-time officers but only garnered one qualified candidate, he said.

A year later, it started the hiring process again and hired one more officer who left six months later for a higher-paying position with a Montgomery County department.

"In the last three years, since June 2020, we've only been fully staffed six months because of the challenges in hiring," Leatherman said.

There were only 17 applicants for the Eastern Berks department's Nov. 19 civil service exam, and only 11 of those show up.

"That's a really low number," Leatherman said.

Especially concerning about the response, he said, is the department held off on advertising the announcement until the 2023 pay rates that included significant pay increases were approved.

The minimum starting pay went to $64,952 from $56,825 under the previous contract. The maximum pay for a patrol officer went to $92,732 from $84,115 under the previous contract.

The number of steps to reach the top step was compressed to two. In other words, an officer with two years of full-time service will earn a base salary of $92,732.

Leatherman has concluded the pay rate cannot be the reason his department is struggling with manpower shortages.

"We're not having trouble hiring and recruiting because we don't pay good pay and benefits," he said. "What we're offering is certainly not at the top scale, but it's not at the bottom either. I think we're right where we should be for a community of comparable size and demographics."