Lateral recruitment is quickly becoming the fastest lever police departments have for filling vacant patrol slots without waiting a full academy cycle. Instead of building an officer from day one, an agency brings in a sworn, certified officer who already carries field experience from another department. For agencies staring down a staffing gap they cannot fill fast enough, that difference in timeline is everything.
Most agencies still treat lateral recruitment as a nice bonus on top of academy hiring instead of a core strategy. That is a mistake. The data shows lateral hiring is one of the few levers that moves the vacancy number quickly, and the agencies leaning into it are already seeing results.
What lateral recruitment actually means
A lateral hire is an officer who is already POST certified and currently or recently employed by another agency, applying to transfer rather than start from zero. They skip or shorten the academy; they already understand patrol procedure, and in many states they can be sworn in within weeks rather than the six months to a year it takes to build a new recruit.
That speed is the entire appeal. A new recruit typically needs months of academy training plus field training before they can carry a solo caseload. A qualified lateral candidate can often be running calls inside a single quarter.
The staffing crisis is pushing lateral recruitment to the front of the strategy
The pressure behind this shift is real. Most agencies now report that finding qualified candidates has gotten harder every year, and the applicant pool for entry-level positions keeps shrinking. Agencies that used to rely entirely on academy classes are running out of runway.
Seattle is a useful case study here. As of August 2024, the department reported 933 deployable officers, with 34 lateral candidates moving through pre-employment screening that year, up from 18 the year before. By mid 2025, the city reported it had brought on as many lateral hires that year as in the previous five years combined at the same point, alongside a sharp jump in total applications. That is not a small tweak to the recruiting mix. That is a department leaning hard into lateral recruitment because it works faster than anything else in the toolbox.
The real cost of building an officer from scratch
Academy training is not cheap, and it is not fast. Hiring, training, and equipment can cost as much as $100,000, and most agencies will wait a year until an officer can work a shift on their own.
A lateral hire skips most of that cost curve. They still need onboarding and department-specific training, but you are not paying for hundreds of hours of foundational instruction the candidate already has. For a department stretched thin on both budget and instructor time, that matters as much as the speed does.
What actually slows a lateral recruitment pipeline down
If lateral recruitment is this valuable, why do so many agencies still struggle to land lateral candidates? Three problems show up again and again.
Certification portability confusion
Every state handles POST reciprocity differently, and many agencies do a poor job explaining the process on their careers page. A qualified officer in a neighboring state who cannot quickly figure out what your certification requirements are will assume it is not worth the hassle and move on.
Slow, generic outreach
Lateral candidates are not cold leads. They are working professionals with a job, a pension, and a life already built around their current agency. Generic marketing police departments send to entry-level candidates, heavy on department pride and light on specifics, does little to move an experienced officer. Marketing for police officers who are already sworn needs to speak directly to pay parity, pension portability, and a faster path to full duty.
No system tracking the pipeline
This is where the proven recruiting scam shows up in many agency budgets. Vendors sell expensive lateral campaigns measured in impressions and website visits, with no way to show how many of those impressions turned into an actual hired lateral officer. Without an applicant tracking system for police agencies behind the campaign, agencies can’t catch candidates who stall between application and background check, and they can’t prove which spend is actually working.
Building a lateral recruitment strategy that holds up
The agencies getting real traction on lateral recruitment are combining a few specific moves.
They post clear, direct information about certification transfer and pay parity right on the job listing, so an interested lateral candidate does not have to email three people to get a straight answer. They use police recruiting software and public safety recruiting solutions that let recruiters see exactly where every lateral candidate sits in the pipeline instead of relying on spreadsheets and guesswork. They also treat police recruiting tools as an investment in speed, not just record-keeping. Since lateral candidates already have options, a department that replies to an inquiry in hours instead of days consistently wins the candidate over an agency still working through a slower process.
This same infrastructure supports recruiting millennials in law enforcement and other experienced officers considering a move, since both groups respond to the same signals: clarity, speed, and a process that respects their time. Good police staffing software gives recruiters the visibility to act on all of it at once, which is exactly why lateral recruitment and law enforcement recruiting strategies are increasingly treated as the same conversation rather than two separate budgets.
Putting it together
Lateral recruitment is not a shortcut around the staffing crisis. It is one of the few strategies with real evidence behind it right now, from the growth in lateral applications in departments actively investing in the process to the hard cost savings of not rebuilding every officer from the academy up. Agencies that build a clear, fast, well-tracked lateral pipeline are filling vacancies faster than agencies waiting on the next academy class to graduate.
If your agency is ready to build a lateral recruitment pipeline that actually converts qualified candidates instead of losing them to a faster competitor, Safeguard Recruiting can help. We build the tracking, communication, and outreach systems that turn interested lateral candidates into sworn officers on your roster.
Book a call with our team and let’s start filling your open positions.
Sources
Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2006). *State and local law enforcement training academies, 2006.* U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/redirect-legacy/content/pub/press/slleta06pr.cfm
International Association of Chiefs of Police. (2024). *2024 recruitment and retention survey results.* https://www.theiacp.org/resources/research-study/2024-recruitment-retention-survey-results
Office of Mayor Bruce Harrell. (2025, April 28). *Mayor Harrell celebrates significant increase in police hiring in 2025.* City of Seattle. https://harrell.seattle.gov/2025/04/28/mayor-harrell-celebrates-significant-increase-in-police-hiring-in-2025/
PowerDMS. (2024). *Public safety recruitment: Where agencies lose candidates.* https://www.powerdms.com/policy-learning-center/public-safety-recruitment
The Center Square. (2025, March 31). *Number of Seattle police lateral candidates surges in 2024 and into 2025.* https://www.everettpost.com/state-news/number-of-seattle-police-lateral-candidates-surges-in-2024-and-into-2025
