Given a home-grown applicant who knows the town, or an outsider with a college education, many rural police chiefs and sheriffs say they'd hire the local guy.
Wary of being a training ground for ambitious rookie cops, rural police officials often prefer hiring from within the community - someone familiar with its problems and willing to stick around.Too often, an officer is hired, sponsored through the police academy and soon leaves for better pay or rank. The officers walk away well-trained, courtesy of the rural departments that don't have the manpower or the finances to spare.
"All the larger departments where the big pay is, they're going to get the cream of the crop," Juab County Sheriff Dave Carter said. "The ones that are left over, they're going to be headed to the rural areas just trying to get anything they can get. It's really kind of an unfair deal."
This and other issues of pay and access to higher education prompted rural police chiefs and sheriffs to campaign against a proposed mandate requiring a two-year college degree for Utah officers. Their argument - and the chance it would divide Utah law enforcement - was instrumental in the measure failing.
"A lot of times, a good local officer - a kid that was born and raised in the area - he understands the farmers and the local people a lot better," Carter said.
"If you can find a good officer who has good common sense and who was raised in the area, he'll make just as good or better officer as somebody who was raised in a different area and who was a college graduate."
If a degree were required, not only would rural areas attract those officers turned down by larger departments, they'd likely be strapped to get many applications at all, Price Police Chief Aleck Shilaos said.
"If I were a chief in Salt Lake City, Provo, Logan or St. George, I would require a degree. I cannot do that in Price, Utah," he said.
"Let's talk about teachers. When Granite High School has an opening, they have teachers line up," he said. "Does that occur in Moab? Does that occur in East Carbon City or Panguitch or Kanab?
"In Salt Lake City, the lawyers there are so plentiful they have to advertise," he said. "That doesn't happen in Grand County. In fact, in Grand County, they've got trouble as to who is going to run for the county attorney."
It's not that Shilaos and Carter don't support education.
With headquarters in Nephi, Carter provides a vehicle and gas money for his officers to attend college at night. Shilaos teaches a criminal justice class at the College of Eastern Utah.
They agree, however, that before a college degree becomes a standard in rural departments, there must be greater access to higher education.
"It makes it really hard in these smaller areas to hire local people if they had to be college graduates," Carter said. "In Salt Lake and Logan and Provo . . . there's a college on every corner."
However, educators point out there are two-year criminal justice degrees available from Weber State University at state junior colleges throughout Utah. These programs should make it easier for police to obtain more study.
"You take any kind of profession . . . if a person is going to practice law in Moab, they've got to go where the degree is," said Morris R. Sterrett, chairman of the criminal justice department at Weber State University. "And they come back if they want to stay there. I don't think that just because a person has got the education, it doesn't necessarily mean they don't want to come back to Moab or Kanab."
Historically, training and education were readily available to police through government programs such as the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration program of the late 1960s.
"During the days when there was money available for police officers to go to school, it became like a second job for them," Sterrett said. "The government paid them, basically, to increase their education."
Sterrett, who was hired by WSU in 1973, remembers such programs available statewide.
"In those days, we were teaching 35 classes a quarter in 15 locations all over the state," he said.
New training monies through the crime bill will make that available again, he said.