Reduction in force

It’s cold this January morning, Day 1 for a new class of cadets at the highway patrol training academy in Pearl, Miss. Bulked-up staff officers, barking orders and shaving heads, tower over the cadets. The scene is boot-camp-like, loud and intense, and it’s becoming rare in the evolving policing landscape. Mississippi is one of just a few states that remain focused on paramilitary-­type officer training. The grueling 18 weeks of pushups, pullups, and running, plus CPR, shooting, and academic studies, have a singular purpose: graduating as many qualified troopers as possible. The kind that can serve and protect—and survive—in an increasingly dangerous society.

The stringency could explain the academy’s high attrition rate. Classes start with about 90 cadets, and more than half quit. But even more worrisome for an agency dealing with staffing shortages is the striking decline in the number of ­people who want to be Mississippi state troopers. In years past, thousands applied for an upcoming class. This current round barely mustered 250.

Mississippi may have missed the 2020 anti-police riots, but not their reverberations. Officer recruitment and retention challenges plague the state, like they do the rest of the country. A major contributor? Diminishing respect for the badge.

Police shortages are a national problem, from Fairfax County, Va., where privatizing school crossing guards is under consideration, to Long Beach, Calif., where police no longer respond to minor traffic collisions. It’s an issue for the Birmingham, Ala., Police Department, too, where more than 40% of budgeted positions are open. In Baltimore, Md., even a $10,000 signing bonus can’t fill the ranks.

Shortages are especially hard on small departments, like the one Alex Miller oversees in Summit, Miss. When the town appointed then 37-year-old Miller as police chief in 2023, he inherited a staff accustomed to working lots of overtime to help fill the gaps. Even Miller had to step in at times, patrolling the streets and conducting investigations. The extreme, no-end-in-sight vacancies made the young police chief receptive when a longtime lawman named Troy Floyd came knocking on his door. And praying in his office.

Summit Police Chief Alex Miller Photo by Kim Henderson

“He grasped my vision for our community,” Miller says of Floyd, an officer who’d spent the last years of his career in Mississippi’s Department of Corrections but wanted a change before cashing in on his retirement. “He knew I wanted active patrolling, visible presence. I wanted people to feel safe sitting on their porches again.”

He hired Floyd, and the effect on the department was immediate. Young officers showed up early for their shifts to spend time with the jovial Christian who, over the course of a 26-year career in law enforcement, had become highly skilled in making narcotics arrests. Miller says they wanted to learn from Floyd. “When you’ve been in that type of work for so long, detecting drugs [during a traffic stop] comes natural. It came naturally for Troy. But a lot of younger guys look over things, and that’s just training and growth and development.”

Last August, Floyd was part of a midday license checkpoint near downtown Summit, just blocks away from a school and a large Baptist church. The kind of prime visibility Miller says he was after. “Parents see us, teachers can see us close by. It lets the community know we’re here.” He points out that checkpoints are also a way to build rapport and respect. “If a mom is having trouble buckling up her child’s restraint seat, we can show her the proper way to get that done.”

But it wasn’t a mom who pulled up to the stop that day around 2 p.m. It was Usher Leonard, a 25-year-old repeat offender who had violated conditions of his 2020 prison release, a release that came at the height of calls for policing reforms.

As Usher rolled his vehicle to a stop at Floyd’s checkpoint, he knew outstanding warrants were circulating for his arrest. He was determined he would not go back to prison.

Moments later, Miller was sitting in his office when he heard a call come over his police radio—shots fired, right down the street. He and his lieutenant took off in their cruiser, arriving at the scene to find Floyd on the ground and his fellow officer scanning with his weapon. Miller quickly saw Floyd’s gunshot wounds were serious. “We gathered him up into a patrol unit. My lieutenant started to do chest compressions. I used my middle and index fingers to try to stop the bleeding.”

They were four minutes away from Southwest Regional Medical Center. Miller advised the dispatcher they were coming in hot. “The hospital staff did a tremendous job that day,” he remembers. But they couldn’t save Floyd.

Back in Summit, Floyd’s suspected killer, Usher Leonard, also died after a shootout that left two more officers wounded. But not before he took time—on the run—to make a derogatory Facebook post about Floyd, an officer the out-of-town felon likely had never met before that day.

Miller didn’t read the post, but he heard about it. “It was just a sad day to know that people are walking around with that mindset. They hate the police.” He’s not sure the unrest unleashed in 2020 is to blame for the disrespect he and his officers experience, but he’s convinced it starts in the home. “There’s a new generation that will never see eye-to-eye with law enforcement. Never.”

Some, for good reason.

The same month Troy Floyd was murdered, six former Mississippi law enforcement officers pleaded guilty to torturing and abusing two black men, one of whom was shot in the mouth. According to a federal charging document, the officers sometimes called themselves “the Goon Squad” because of their willingness to use excessive force.

Such instances of officer misconduct and brutality do great damage to the image of law enforcement, even though they’re rare.

Meanwhile in Summit, Miller is trying to attract new police applicants who, if hired, will start out at $16 an hour. He knows it will take more than an increase in public respect to compensate for those low wages, but in times past, esteem for the profession was a draw. It kept good officers from leaving for greener pastures and made difficult, decades-long careers palatable. He’d like to see those days return. But even if they do, Miller believes his department will always have a gaping hole in the ranks: “You just can’t replace a Troy Floyd.”

Please read Part 3 of this 360 feature: “Privatizing protection”