Spokane County Sheriff’s Office will keep offering $25,000 signing bonuses

The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office will keep offering new hires signing bonuses of up to $25,000.

The Spokane County Commission this week unanimously voted to give the Sheriff’s Office permission to keep the hiring incentives going for at least another year.

Former Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich began offering bonuses two years ago in an attempt to recruit more officers. Like many law enforcement agencies throughout the country, the Sheriff’s Office was shorthanded and struggling to find enough deputies.

The bonuses started out at $15,000 for lateral hires – experienced officers coming to Spokane County from other agencies. The county commission in March 2022 approved Knezovich’s request to increase that to $25,000 for laterals and $10,000 for inexperienced deputies.

Undersheriff Kevin Richey said in an interview that Spokane County has to keep offering bonuses if it wants to have enough deputies. Police departments throughout America are all trying to hire from a limited pool of candidates.

“Staffing and recruiting, every agency in the country is actually in trouble, but this keeps us competitive with other agencies that are offering bonuses,” Richey said.

Some law enforcement agencies offer bonuses even bigger than $25,000. The Alameda Police Department in California began offering $75,000 bonuses this spring.

While the county commission approved the signing bonus extension, the bonus policy is changing.

From now on, lateral hires will only receive $10,000 of the bonus up front. They’ll get the rest incrementally, paycheck by paycheck, during the course of their first two years in Spokane County. If they don’t last two years, they won’t get the full $25,000.

Before, the Sheriff’s Office had given new hires half of the bonus up front and half at the end of their first year.

Richey said he hopes the change will improve retention. About 20% of new hires have left the Sheriff’s Office since the signing bonuses began in 2021.

Most of those new hires left because their spouses didn’t love the area or they needed to go back home to look after loved ones, Richey said. It’s doubtful, he said, that many people were strategically staying just long enough to collect the bonus and then leaving.

Knezovich last year said the bonuses, in conjunction with a national advertising campaign, led to one of the agency’s best hiring years on record.

But the Sheriff’s Office is still shorthanded by 35 deputies and has consistently had between 20 and 40 vacancies over the past two years. Those vacancy numbers are somewhat misleading out of context, however, because the Sheriff’s Office has gone from 227 authorized deputy positions in 2021 to roughly 250 today.

Richey said while the Sheriff’s Office would likely lose out on some new hires if it couldn’t offer signing bonuses, they aren’t the only solution to staffing shortages.

“It’s one piece of the pie,” he said. “It’s not everything.”