Police pilot new hiring program to address staffing shortages

Waltham’s police department is trying a new hiring strategy: This year, new recruits can apply even without prior police training. 

New hires will still have to go through police academy training before starting on the force..

According to Police Chief Kevin O’Connell, Waltham needs this new approach. The police department is understaffed, and O’Connell said it’s had a hard time finding new hires through the state-assembled candidate list. 

Now, the department is expanding its hiring search to include candidates from municipal or university police departments that do not participate in the Civil Service system, as well as civilians without prior police experience.

At June’s budget hearings, O’Connell said some duties, such as enforcing traffic regulations, have been falling through the cracks while the department has only been able to staff shifts at a minimum standard. 

The WPD has made some hires and closed some of its vacancies, but as of the end of July, it still needed to fill six positions.

While overall crime rates are declining in Waltham, O’Connell said he would like to expand the WPD’s ranks even further, although he added that the department doesn’t have immediate plans to expand. 

Waltham’s Police Department is a Civil Service organization, a designation originally created to combat corruption and nepotism in local police forces. It requires the department to follow certain fairness and reporting standards, including in hiring. In March, however, the state gave Waltham permission to hire up to half of new police officers from outside of the Civil Service list.

The WPD is reserving judgement on the efficacy of this alternate hiring pathway. O’Connell said the department will evaluate the program “after we have had an opportunity to go through the [hiring] process,” although he didn’t specify how the department will measure its success.

The alternate pathways program

This alternate pathway program opened up in 2024 as part of statewide public service reforms. Sophia Hall, deputy litigation director at the Boston-based legal organization Lawyers for Civil Rights, said this program is new enough that there’s not much data out there about it, and it’s hard to assess its results.

Hall said it’s a bad idea for police departments to leave the Civil Service entirely behind. She said that even if its traditional hiring list is restrictive, the program as a whole creates important tools to keep police hiring systems fair and fight discrimination that can, in the long run, lead to unequal policing and keep promising candidates out of local departments. 

Dave Koffman, senior executive and legislative director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, said the new program offered important flexibility to police departments around the state. He said many departments have abandoned their Civil Service status over the past decade because they felt their hands were tied by its hiring requirements, emphasizing that 59 of the state’s 98 Civil Service departments have opted to hire through alternate pathways since the program’s adoption.

Koffman said Waltham’s police department isn’t the only municipal department having trouble hiring, noting that there has been a decline in candidates applying to many types of specialized municipal jobs across the state.