Innovation in child care is coming from a surprising source: Police departments

Earlier this year, a brand-new child care center opened up in San Diego, serving about 25 families. 

The center charges parents 50 percent less than market rate, and child care 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 child care 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.

Tanya Meisenholder, the director of gender equity at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, says child care is one of the job barriers she hears about most often from female cops and those considering entering the profession. Women make up only 12 percent of sworn officers and 3 percent of police leadership in the US, though there’s a national campaign underway to increase those numbers.

“Child care is the one thing that’s been brought up over and over not only as a barrier to entry but a barrier to promotion,” Meisenholder said. “Police child care would show the agencies value their employees and are listening to their concerns. It has the potential to be somewhat transformative.”

The idea is spreading quickly

Angelie Hoxie, a state police detective in Idaho, heard about the San Diego child care idea and wanted to see if she could build a similar model for Treasure Valley, which covers the greater Boise region.

Idaho police agencies have struggled with recruitment and retention, and many families are on year-long child care waitlists. The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children said over 90 percent of child care facilities cite staffing as their top challenge.

In early 2022 Hoxie helped launch the Treasure Valley Law Enforcement Coalition and within a year they were lobbying state and federal officials and partnering with a local university and local philanthropy. 

By winter 2023, Republican Gov. Brad Little was recommending funding for Idaho police child care programs in his workforce development budget, and by March, a bill to support the effort passed out of both chambers of the Idaho legislature. Republican Rep. Mike Simpson then successfully earmarked $2.65 million from the federal budget to help finance the new child care center. Construction is set to launch this summer with the program to be operational for police families by 2025.

St. Louis County in Missouri is another region 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 workers. Their goal now is to care for up to 75 kids at a time, and by operating for 18 hours a day, upwards of 150 families could be served.

The push was prompted by a rank-and-file woman officer during the pandemic who struggled to find 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’re absolutely hoping it helps with both recruitment and retention,” said Tracy Panus, a spokesperson for St. Louis County police.

Democratic Rep. Scott Peters, whose congressional district includes San Diego, introduced 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 also allow Health and Human Services to provide grants of up to $3 million for new police child care centers. In December the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed the legislation.

“There’s no question that [child care] is a priority—it has come up in every single focus group we’ve done,” said Kym Craven, the executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.

Taking some cues from the US military

That police might take on leadership in child care is less surprising when one looks to the Department of Defense, which sponsors the nation’s only federally run universal child care program. 

The military child care program, which serves roughly 200,000 children, is known for being affordable and 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 last few years about how to expand and improve upon this child care program to boost army recruitment even further.

Still, expanding public subsidies for police child care is not popular with everyone, including those who want less public money subsidizing police departments, and those who want to see public dollars prioritizing child care for low-income families.

Others have raised concerns with the idea of employer-sponsored child care more broadly. In one report published this past winter, Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, argued that employer-sponsored child care “does nothing to address the fundamental challenges within the child care system, nor does it promote a pluralistic system of choice.” 

He compared the model to painkillers for cancer. “They can ease the pain for a while, but the body gets sicker, and the temptation to overly rely on painkillers only grows,” he wrote.

Still, advocates for police child care say the public safety needs are too urgent, and the possible benefits to communities and agencies too great to pass up. They hope in five years they will have firmer data showing their investments have worked.

“In this new generation not too many people want to become law enforcement officers,” said Mackay. “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 reporting.