sub-text, despite all our efforts we could not recruit enough abcdef...xyz's to fill the vacate positions...seems nobody want to be Ballamo cop.
You just have far fewer people willing to be cops. A good friend of mine recently lost the mayoral election in a major American city. He's a Democrat, but old-school type and pro-police. He'd been in city government for awhile, and told me before the election that the police union had told him that if he didn't win, recruitment was going to crater even worse than it had.
It used to be that when the city would advertise for a new police academy class, the line would be more than 1000 people long. Now, they get less than 100, most of whom are excluded for various reasons.
Truth is that most major cities cannot fill their police academy classes, and are running short of cops. And it snowballs, because the fewer cops, the harder policing gets, and the job becomes even less attractive.
I have two friends who were Baltimore cops. Both quit in the last two months. One was a street cop, the other plain clothes.