Earlier this year, a brand new child care center opened in San Diego, serving about 25 families.
The center charges parents 50 percent less than the market rate, and child care workers are paid 15 percent more than the going local average. Its operation hours are flexible. It is open daily from 5:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., longer than most childcare centers, and can accommodate emergencies such as unexpected work shifts. There’s just one catch: To send your child, you have to work for the San Diego Police Department.
San Diego’s law enforcement childcare center, funded by both public and private funds, is the first of its kind in the country, but plans are already underway for several more across the United States. A Bipartisan bill Congress will expand the model further.
Supporters call law enforcement childcare a win-win — a way to help diversify policing by making it more accessible to women, at a time when police are a recruiting tool. Resignation and retirement are upAnd The application is below. And, frankly, they hope that an innovative model for child care will give a PR boost to a profession that has suffered serious damage to its reputation over the past decade.
But it also raises a fundamental question: why only the police? What about subsidizing other professions, including other first responders like firefighters and nurses?
“My response is that other professions have not been demonized as much as law enforcement,” said Jim McKay, a retired police detective and founder of the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which has advocated for these child care centers and worked with police departments. Their construction “My philosophy is that if you have a healthy law enforcement, everything else thrives off of that, and we need to treat the problems with law enforcement first.”
There’s no data yet on whether this employer-focused model will pay off, but advocates argue that investing in childcare is a smart bet. Each center has an estimated annual operating cost of $2 million, while the average cost of hiring and training a police officer is $200,000. In other words, if it helps keep just ten officers in the position, it will be worth it.
Tanya Meisenholder, Gender Equality Director Policing project at the NYU School of Law, says childcare is one of the job barriers she hears most often from female cops and those considering entering the profession. Only 12 percent of sworn officers and 3 percent of police leadership in the United States are women, though there are A national campaign is underway To increase this number.
“Child care is something that has come up time and time again not just as a barrier to entry but as a barrier to outreach,” Meisenholder said. “Police childcare will show agencies value their staff and are listening to their concerns. It has the potential to be somewhat variable.”
The idea is spreading fast
Angeli Hoxie, a state police detective in Idaho, heard about the San Diego childcare concept and wanted to see if she could develop a similar model for the Treasure Valley, which covers the greater Boise area.
Idaho police agencies have struggled with recruitment and retention, and many families are on year-round child care waiting lists. The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children said more than 90 percent cited child care facility staffing as a top challenge.
Hoxie helped launch the Treasure Valley Law Enforcement Coalition in early 2022, and within a year they were lobbying state and federal officials and partnering with a local university and local philanthropy.
By the winter of 2023, Republican Gov. Brad Little was recommending funding for the Idaho Police Child Care Program in his workforce development budget, and by March, a bill to support the effort passed both chambers of the Idaho Legislature. Then-Republican Rep. Mike Simpson Successfully determined $2.65 million To help fund new childcare centers from the federal budget. Construction is set to begin this summer with plans for the police family to be operational by 2025.
St. Louis County in Missouri is another area set to open a law enforcement child care center next year, following the same model as San Diego: longer hours of service, subsidized rates for parents and higher wages for staff. Their goal now is to care for up to 75 children at a time, and by operating 18 hours a day, more than 150 families can be served.
The push was prompted by a rank-and-file female officer during the pandemic who struggled to care for her 1-year-old while balancing her new 12-hour shifts. Twelve-hour shifts have since become the norm for the department even after Covid-19.
“We fully expect this to help with both recruitment and retention,” St. Louis County Police spokeswoman Tracy Panas said.
Democratic Rep. Scott Peters, whose congressional district includes San Diego, Introduce a Police Child Care Bill Last year to authorize $24 million annually in funding under the federal Child Care Development Grant Program. The bill would allow Health and Human Services to provide up to $3 million in grants for new police child care centers. Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus in December Law approved.
“There is no question about it [child care] A priority—it came up in every single focus group we did,” said Kim Craven, executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.
Taking some cues from the US military
The leadership that police can take on child care is less surprising when one looks at the Department of Defense, which sponsors the nation’s only federally run public child care program.
The military child care program, which serves about 200,000 children, is known for being affordable and of high quality, and its 23,000 child care workers are paid higher wages than their private sector counterparts. Members of Congress and former military leaders have been in discussions over the past few years about expanding and improving these child care programs to increase recruitment in the military.
Still, expanding public subsidies for police child care isn’t popular with everyone, including those who want less public money to subsidize police departments and those who want to see public dollars prioritize child care for low-income families.
Others have raised concerns about the concept of employer-sponsored childcare more broadly. a The report was published last winterEliot Haspel, author of Crawling Backward: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix Itargued that employer-sponsored child care “does nothing to address fundamental challenges within the child care system, nor does it promote a pluralistic system of choice.”
He compared the model to cancer painkillers. “They may relieve pain for a while, but the body becomes sicker and the temptation to over-rely on painkillers increases,” he writes.
Still, advocates for police child care say the need for public safety is too urgent, and the potential benefits to communities and agencies too great to pass up. They hope that in five years they will have more solid data showing that their investment has worked.
“Not many people in this new generation want to be law enforcement officers,” Mackay said. “We’re really trying to stem that tide.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this report.
