This is an opinion column.

No one wants the job anymore, it seems. Or very few. Too few.

Too few want to be a police officer. Not just here in Alabama. Everywhere.

Too few desire to serve and protect.

To do so was once a calling for many. A proud calling typically inspired by the service of a family member or loved one. Or the officer who visited your school. Or waved as you played in the front yard while they drove by.

Not so much anymore.

Birmingham Police Chief Scott Thurmond would love to hire more officers for the department’s narcotics division, which is increasingly strained by the growing plague of fentanyl deaths—and further combat the scourge of violence that continues to claim lives. “We’re just not able to at this time,” he told me recently.

BPD has more than 800 unfilled allotments, it says. Only four new officers were sworn in at the city’s police academy graduation last December. “We started an academy class in February,” said Thurmond. “We had about twenty-four come that we were going to hire but thirteen couldn’t pass the polygraph and the psychological so that disqualified them. “

In Mobile, the department is budgeted this year for 488 officers, yet is down about 70, counts Chief Paul Prine. Last year, 83 officers left the department; 61 (73%) resigned, 16 retired and six were fired. Already in 2023, 19 officers have left: 16 resigned, two retired, one was terminated.

“I’m confident in saying that most of those officers leave to go to other jobs,” Prine told AL.com’s John Sharp. “They are jobs that have more desirable working conditions.”

There are 24 recruits in Mobile’s current academy. Still, like in Birmingham and other major cities, there aren’t enough graduates to match the gone. The math’s just not mathin’.

“We struggle to recruit and retain,” Prine said.

“We’re getting a little more coming to the table,” added Thurmond. “But it’s not quite the group that we need to be law enforcement.”

The lure of the badge began to lose luster decades ago for myriad reasons. Corruption began to outshine courage in many departments. The abuse of stop-and-frisk, the policy allowing police to stop and search anyone deemed reasonably suspicious, body slammed protect and serve as an inordinate percentage of Blacks were regularly stopped, often unreasonably.

Officers, then too, began moving away from the communities and neighborhoods that were their beat, particularly low-income, predominantly Black communities, and neighborhoods. They beat it, moving to working- and middle-class enclaves, predominantly white.

Then there are the killings of Black men and women.

I lived in New York in 1999 when four plainclothes police officers fired 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old unarmed Guinean immigrant, outside his apartment building just before midnight. He was mistaken for a suspect, they later claimed, and after being told to show his hands, Diallo reached towards his pocket for his wallet. Within moments, he lay dead; 19 of the bullets penetrated his body.

A year later, a jury in Albany, N.Y., declared the four involved officers not guilty of reckless endangerment and second-degree murder.

Twenty-one years later, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed Black man who died crying for his mother and screaming, “I can’t breathe” as Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes.

In between, the spate of killings of Black men and women by white police nationwide, and the rise since of an ugly, dark pit in police culture that terrorizes irrespective of the officer’s race (see: Memphis) all but transformed police into pariahs.

Into something no one wants to be.

Activists demanded that police budgets be slashed, unleashing a divisive narrative that lingers over policing like an unyielding stench.

“It has hurt us,” Prine said. “It’s a nationwide problem. We are seeing the end result.”

No one wants the job anymore, it seems. Or very few. Too few.

Nashville might change that. Huntsville, too. Even if just a smidgen.

Related: Face it, America, we love our guns more than our children

Bodycam footage of the Nashville officers unhesitatingly storming into and through Covenant School last Monday, then felling a shooter who’d killed six—three nine-year-old students, three adults—was heart-thumping haunting. It was the starkest contrast to what we saw last May in Uvalde, Texas, where law enforcement cowered in hallways of the Robb Elementary school for an eternity of minutes as a shooter killed 19 children and two adults before being felled.

Nashville Police Chief John Drake: “We will never wait to make entry and to go in and to stop a threat, especially when it deals with our children.”

A friend who is a retired New York City officer said: “You could tell they took their training seriously and were ready for action.”

Huntsville officers Garrett Crumby and Albert Morin were trained and dutifully prepared, too, as they responded to a call about a shooting at an apartment complex. A shooting amid the sort of domestic violence dispute officers engage routinely now. Too much so.

Not long after arriving Crumby and Morning were ambushed, police say, by Juan Robert Laws, the 24-year-old involved in the dispute. Both officers were shot. Crumby died; Morin is still fighting to survive. Laws is in a Huntsville cell charged with capital murder of a law enforcement officer.

Heroism can take many forms—some visible, some less so. Though no less heroic. No less dangerous.

Policing endured a deserved scrutiny it direly needed. Scrutiny about why officers measure I felt in danger for my life differently when looking at someone Black versus someone white. About a culture so entrenched Black officers are inculcated, too, such that they brazenly beat an unarmed Black man to death on a dark Memphis street corner (beneath, thankfully, an all-seeing camera, whose footage was heart-thumping harrowing, too).

About so much that had been overlooked and ignored for far too long. So much that was hidden behind a thick blue curtain. So much that had to change.

Some of it has—juries now put people like Chauvin in prison, and officials now more often charge officers for their crimes instead of allowing them to shrink behind a fading, pale blue line.

Much still must change.

Courageous and accountable can co-exist—should co-exist. Seeming diametrically opposing ideas can both be embraced—should be embraced.

Nashville and Huntsville just may help rekindle a profession that was once a calling, a noble and necessary one that once inspired so many.

And may yet begin inspiring more.

John Sharp contributed to this column.

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

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Woke is the far right’s sky is falling; it fell on them

I’d like to thank my teachers, too, and this coach

Gov. Ivey’s legacy: Prisons? Medicaid? Her choice

Alabama Republican’s ‘parents’ rights’ bill smells like ‘states’ rights’; I’m holding my nose

Early release of the 369 is the most compassionate, smartest thing Alabama prisons have ever done.

Roy S. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach him at [email protected], follow him at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj