The city of San Diego will have to increase its recruitment efforts for officers over the next few years to keep a strong police force. According to Fox News in San Diego, 16 percent of police officers with the San Diego Police Department are currently eligible to retire and more than half will reach retirement eligibility within four years. Jeff Jordan, the vice president of the San Diego Police Officers Association, said they expect nearly all of those eligible officers to have left the force within nine years, leaving the SDPD with a severe shortage unless replacements are hired.

Though a huge portion of the police force will be eligible to retire in the next several years, it does financially benefit the officers to stay on after they are entitled to retire. According to a policy brief from The Foundation for Educational choice, police officers get a pension equal to as much as 3 percent of their final average salary times their years of service. So, although an officer may be eligible to retire at the age of 50, if he or she stays on with the force until the age of 60 and has accrued 30 years of service, he will get a pension equal to 90 percent of his average salary.

Some leaving SDPD for other forces
On top of those who will retire, the SDPD have already lost nearly a third of the officers that have been hired since the summer of 2005, or around 250 of recruits Fox 5 News reported. An additional 17 officers have left the SDPD to work for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department as well as to police departments in surrounding cities and across Southern California. As of April 1, the SDPD had 1,841 sworn officers, almost 130 less than the budget calls for.

The SDPD is doing everything in its power to boost these numbers but, as is so often the case, it comes down to money. Assistant Chief Shelley Zimmerman understands the motivation of many new recruits and veteran officers for leaving.

"It wasn't necessarily for salary, what they kept telling us it was for take-home pay," Zimmerman said, according to Fox 5 News. "Literally, they could change a uniform — didn't necessarily have to sell their house to go to another local agency — just change their uniform, and in some cases they're making $1,100 more a month."

Jordan and Zimmerman are turning to the city council for answers, believing that they have done everything possible on their end, despite only having a net gain of nine officers since July 2012.