Police Residency Requirements

Police residency requirements, which mandate that officers live within a specified geographic area, may be found in state statutes, state and local civil service rules, or departmental regulations. According to the 1991 International City Management Association Survey of Police Personnel Practices, 29% of American cities with populations over 10,000 have some form of residency policy. Eight percent had residency requirements for new appointees, 13% had such requirements for all officers, 5% required residency of officers hired after a specified date, and 10% required the police chief to reside locally. Among America's six largest police departments, polled in 2003, Philadelphia and Chicago require in-city residency, and New York, Detroit, Houston, and Los Angeles do not.

Residency requirements generally fall into two categories. Durational residency entails a job aspi-rant's living in an area for a given length of time as a prerequisite for being hired. Continuous residency involves an employee's living in a prescribed area as a condition for keeping his or her position. This latter type may have substantial long-term effects on police officers’ lives and has long been a source of labor–management conflict.

Police residency rules were a natural outgrowth of the political patronage system that developed in the early 19th century, when local political leaders [Page 354]rewarded their immigrant supporters with jobs in the police department and other city agencies. Police reformers, drawn from more upper-class society, sought to break the ward leaders’ hold over hiring and broaden the pool of police applicants by eliminating residency requirements. As “professional” police became the gospel of progressive departments throughout the first half of the 20th century, residency requirements fell out of favor.

The racial unrest in many cities in the 1960s revived interest in residency laws, as critics of police conduct argued that the high proportion of white officers from outlying suburban residences were insensitive and antagonistic toward minority communities. Over the next two decades, primarily in the northeastern and north central areas of the United States, municipalities began reinstating residency rules, both to address racial tensions and provide job opportunities to urban minorities. The trend was most pronounced in cities experiencing economic difficulties, where the hiring of resident officers was intended to both ease unemployment and encourage officers to spend their paychecks within city borders.

A comparison of police residency requirements surveyed in 1982 and 1990 found a 1% net decrease in such policies, with more central cities and suburbs dropping residency requirements and more independent communities adopting them. Research suggests that municipalities that embraced residency rules over this period were more likely to have been experiencing economic decline. In these instances, the residency restrictions were associated with a reduced pool of applicants, decreased applicant screening and selection efforts, and lowered wages, which in turn reduced the cost of police services and ultimately may have contributed to improved fiscal health. Police agencies with residency rules were also associated with the use of numeric goals to achieve racial diversity, suggesting that the rules served to deter nontargeted groups from applying. Finally, those with residency policies tended to have more extensive inservice training, as well as officer skills and professionalism that were comparable to agencies without residency requirements.

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