Turns out it's not just local police departments that are struggling to staff up. DPS is also short by about 1,500 officers across the state. Turns out law enforcement agencies across the country are all facing this problem.
Retired Houston Police Department Captain Greg Fremin says the problem here is clear. He said, "Law enforcement, the military, and other private sectors are fighting over a small pool of resources, and that's qualified candidates."
On top of the difficulty in recruiting new officers, DPS resources are also being strained by the border crisis. Fremin said that, "I know personally that every two weeks, a vast number of troopers who would regularly be assigned to highway patrol are shipped down to the border. They have to do a two-week duty assignment there."
He says that's creating an added layer of public safety risk because, "everything that you can think of that troopers do on the road, they're not there."
The icing on the cake is that there isn't any one simple solution to this problem, and even in the best-case scenario, it could take anywhere from ten to fifteen years for Texas DPS and other law enforcement agencies across the country to get fully staffed.