DeKALB – Staffing levels for the NIU police department are rising and recovering from a nationwide trend of police shortages after the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
“We have definitely had an increase (since the pandemic) because we were down by about 15, almost 20%,” said Chief of NIU Police Darren Mitchell. “That’s turned around, and we’re still hiring.”
Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Data Explorer shows that the department had 38 officers in 2022 and 34 officers in 2023. According to NIU, NIU PD currently has 41 police officers.
Mitchell said police departments use a basic formula from the FBI based on factors such as population per capita.
NIU’s police department is focused on “prevention based policing” which requires more officers than recommended by the formula, Mitchell said.
Police departments had an average of 2.4 officers per 1,000 people in 2023, according to FBI statistics.
“We’re not focused on trying to wait for somebody to call us and say they’ve been victimized and then we go and try to apprehend the criminal after the fact,” Mitchell said. “We want to prevent the crime from happening in the first place.”
New officers go through a police academy which takes 16 weeks to complete.
Mitchell said four officers recently completed the police academy and four are currently in the academy. The department is planning to continue hiring and hopes to send five more officers to the academy in January.
To compensate for the limited number of officers, NIU contracted with Securitas Security Services USA, a security contractor, from August 2022 through May 2024.
“They (Securitas) did well,” Mitchell said. “They accomplished our goals and helped us meet our needs, doing the things that we expected in order to impact issues of crime.”
Securitas was used as a supplemental unarmed force that notified NIU police of incidents they observed while patrolling campus, according to Mitchell.
“It helped us until we saw the shift in the number of applications for police personnel,” Mitchell said. “We’re getting to that point where our department is getting fully staffed.”
