From LinkedIn

Some Standards Are Worth the Vacancy

This was originally posted on my LinkedIn on August 12, 2026.

Yesterday I was meeting with our talent acquisition team talking about recruiting.

It’s tough out there right now. Agencies are competing for many of the same applicants, vacancies are putting more pressure on the officers already here, and budgets are getting tighter.

At one point, our recruiter challenged one of our hiring requirements. We talked through why we had it, whether it still made sense, and ultimately decided to keep it.

But I really appreciated that she challenged it.

It reminded me of a quote I came across recently:

“If you weaken the standard to accommodate incompetence, you weaken the culture.”

I definitely wouldn’t use the word incompetence, but I couldn’t argue with the point.

Yesterday’s conversation was a good reminder for me that questioning a requirement isn’t the same thing as lowering a standard. I want people to question why we do things. Maybe something we’ve always required doesn’t make sense anymore, or there’s a better way to accomplish the same thing. And sometimes, like yesterday, we’ll talk it through and decide it’s still there for a reason.

What I don’t want is for the pressure to hire people to become the reason we start changing standards that matter.

I can’t do that.

As law enforcement leaders, the communities we serve trust us with a tremendous amount of responsibility. Part of that trust is expecting us to be careful about who we give a badge to. And our officers have to trust the people we put beside them. The person we hire today could be the person another officer is depending on tomorrow when things go bad.

I don’t take either of those things lightly.

We should keep questioning how we do things. We should be willing to change when something doesn’t make sense anymore. But when a standard is there for a reason, we also have to be willing to keep it, even when that makes hiring harder.

Some standards are worth the vacancy.

Want to see the conversation? Read the comments on LinkedIn.