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First responder fields—including law enforcement, firefighting, and emergency management services (EMS)—serve a crucial role in the safety and well-being of communities around the country. Public citizens and officials have placed a renewed focus on improving agencies’ relations with their local communities by ensuring that first responders reflect the populations they serve. The potential benefits of increasing diversity and moving toward greater representation could also provide more secure and rewarding employment opportunities to historically underrepresented populations, thus having implications for local economic and workforce development. The report provides the findings of the First Responder Workforce Diversity Study, designed to better understand the benefits. Under the study the researchers visited a purposive sample of five sites identified as having well-established diversity efforts to gather more in-depth, contextualized information about the promising practices implemented and their potential, both achieved and anticipated, for increasing the diversity of their local first responder workforce. The five selected sites represented several different first responder fields, focused on different points in the employment pipeline, and used different strategies to target diversity of various populations. The report provides the study findings.

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Key Takeaways

• Organizational and leadership support of diversity was notable across sites. It included a diverse leadership (in terms of both race/ethnicity and gender), an emphasis on diversity as a priority, and open discussions among staff about the importance and meaning of diversity.
• Recruiting was the primary tool used at the sites to increase diversity. Promising recruitment practices include population-specific liaisons, financial incentives for language skills, and targeted messaging.
• Community engagement activities served as both direct and indirect recruitment methods. These activities include partnerships with local schools, colleges, training providers, community organizations, and foundations.
• Sites adjusted hiring practices to ensure a level playing field. These practices include relaxing hiring procedures and requirements that are unduly restrictive and adjusting testing standards to improve equity.
• Sites used specific practices to retain a diverse workforce. They included providing opportunities for promotion and movement between units, offering financial incentives for those who speak multiple languages, and providing a welcoming environment.
• The two police sites identified challenges including high turnover, arduous application processes, low pay, a need for more bilingual staff, maintaining community trust, and retaining younger (millennial) employees.
• One fire site discussed challenges that included high competition for limited openings, recruiting bilingual staff, limited recruitment budgets, and the high cost of training that candidates must often fund themselves.

Citation

Miller, A., Clery, S., Richardson, S., Topper, A., Cronen, S., Lilly, S., Hinkens, E., Yin, M. (2016). Coffey Consulting. Promising Practices for Increasing Diversity Among First Responders. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.