https://jnix.netlify.app/authors/natalie-cotton/ Recent content in Natalie Cotton on Justin Nix Source Themes Academic (https://sourcethemes.com/academic/) en-us © Justin Nix {year} Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://jnix.netlify.app/publication/72-hiring-and-screening/ Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://jnix.netlify.app/publication/72-hiring-and-screening/ For most people who think about applying to a police department, the agency’s website is the whole encounter before they ever talk to a recruiter. In a new paper with Sadaf Hashimi, Natalie Cotton, Jessie Huff, and Erin Kearns — part of a DHS-funded project on insider threats in law enforcement — we asked a basic question nobody had answered at scale: what do those websites actually tell applicants about how hiring and screening work? What We Looked At We sampled 730 agencies (380 municipal police departments, 350 sheriff’s offices), stratified by size and region, and had trained coders comb through every hiring-relevant page, document, and video we could find. We grouped what we saw into six domains — background investigations, mandatory requirements, disqualifying factors, assessment tests, character suitability evaluations, and hiring incentives — and summed them into a 0-to-6 Transparency Index: one point for each domain an agency’s site said anything meaningful about. The average agency scored 3.49 out of 6, and most clustered in the middle — scores of 4 or 5 accounted for nearly half the sample. But averages hide the part that actually matters for applicants. Mandatory requirements (education, age, driver’s license) showed up on 79% of sites, and assessment tests on 80%. Disqualifying factors — the things that get an application rejected outright — appeared on only 42%. Character suitability evaluations, like polygraphs and background interviews, showed up on 54%. The domains agencies were least likely to explain are the ones most likely to determine whether someone’s application goes anywhere. Who’s More Transparent That variation isn’t random. Municipal police departments score higher than sheriff’s offices. Agencies with 100 or more sworn officers score higher than smaller ones, and the largest agencies (500+) score highest of all. And agencies in the West score noticeably higher than every other region, followed by the South and Midwest. None of this tracks the content of an agency’s actual standards — it tracks organizational capacity. Bigger, better-resourced agencies communicate more, full stop. What This Means We want to be careful about what a low score does not mean. An agency that says little online about disqualifying factors or character evaluations isn’t necessarily running a lax hiring process — it may just lack the staff or web infrastructure to post one. But that gap is still consequential. As recruitment increasingly happens online, an applicant’s first read on whether they’re eligible, and what they’re in for, comes from a webpage that — for smaller and rural agencies especially — often says very little. Transparency alone won’t fix policing’s recruitment problems. But it’s a cheap, fixable first step, and right now a lot of agencies are leaving it undone.