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Earlier this year, a brand-new childcare center opened up in San Diego, serving about 25 families.
The center charges parents 50 percent less than market rate, and childcare workers are paid 15 percent above the going local average. Its hours of operation are flexible. It stays open from 5:30 am to 7 pm every day, longer than most child care centers, and can accommodate emergencies like unexpected work shifts. There’s only one catch: To send your child, you have to work for the San Diego Police Department.
San Diego’s law enforcement child care center, funded through both public and private money, is the first of its kind in the country, but plans for several others across the US are already underway. A bipartisan bill in Congress would expand the model further.
Supporters call law enforcement child care a win-win-win — a way to help diversify policing by making it more accessible to women, a recruiting tool at a time when police resignations and retirements are up, and applications are down. And, frankly, they hope that an innovative model for child care will give a PR boost to a profession that has taken severe blows to its reputation over the last decade.
But it also raises a basic question: Why just police? What about subsidizing other professions, including other first responders like firefighters and nurses?
“My response is those other professions haven’t been demonized like law enforcement has,” said Jim Mackay, a retired police detective and the founder of the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which has advocated for these child care centers and worked with police departments to build them. “My philosophy is if you have a healthy law enforcement, then everything else kind of prospers out from that, and we have to treat the problems with law enforcement first.”
There’s no data yet on if this employer-centric model will pay off, but advocates argue that the childcare investment is a smart bet. The estimated annual operating cost for each center is $2 million, while the average cost to recruit and train a single police officer is $200,000. In other words, if this helps keep even just ten officers in the ranks, it will have been worth it.
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Marta Monteiro for Vox
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