Iowa volunteer officers boost police force capacity

Josh Gersten has been a deputy with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office for 20 years, but he started getting paid for the job only last year, and then just for some of his law enforcement tasks.

This is because he is a reserve deputy. Reserve deputies and reserve police officers are certified law enforcement officers who work with agencies on a part-time — often volunteer — basis to supplement the full-time force.

While state law limits the responsibilities of reserve officers and says agencies should not substitute full-time officers with them, Iowa’s reliance on reserve officers has grown at a time agencies say they’re getting fewer applications for officers and using bonuses and perks to try to fill vacancies.

The proportion of the total officers in the state’s forces made up by reserves has slowly inched up recently, data from the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy shows. Where reserve officers made up 5.7 percent of Iowa’s total police force in 2018, they made up 6.7 percent of it in 2022.

Gersten has been a reserve deputy since 2003, and he took on the administrative role of lead reserve deputy in 2008. Last year, the Sheriff’s Office decided to start providing him an hourly wage for the time he spends on leadership duties, which is about 10 to 20 hours a month, in order to recognize the amount of administrative work he does and also provide an incentive for whoever will fill the position when he eventually retires.

The time Gersten spends in uniform remains volunteer.

“This was an opportunity for me to still serve in a law enforcement capacity while keeping a career outside of the field,” Gersten said. “I have always had an interest in law enforcement and was excited to find out that there’s a program where I can serve in law enforcement in a similar fashion to how volunteer firefighters have a career outside of the fire service.”

When Gersten started as a reserve deputy, he was a senior in college studying engineering. He currently works at Integrated DNA Technologies in Coralville.

He is not alone in his desire to work in law enforcement while keeping a full-time job in another field. That is one of the most common reasons why people become reserve peace officers, according to law enforcement professionals.

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Linn County Sheriff Brian Gardner started his career in law enforcement in 1981 as a reserve deputy, which helped him get experience he needed to become a full-time deputy. But most of the reserves he sees now are not interested in becoming full-time.

“When I was a reserve, oftentimes you couldn’t get your foot in the door as a full-time deputy unless you were a reserve,” Gardner said. “But now, more often than not, these reserve officers are people who have secure employment. They’re happy with their employment … but they also want to serve their community.”

Reserve deputies in Linn County are referred to as special deputies, which is a reference an old practice where a sheriff could name anyone as a special deputy sheriff who didn’t have arrest powers or other authority, Gardner said. Other law enforcement agencies had similar groups of non-officer categories, but the state didn’t step in to regulate the use of reserve officers until 1980. A bill was passed then requiring law enforcement agencies to meet certain requirements in order to appoint reserve officers.

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More laws have been passed since then to further regulate the use of reserve officers, such as requiring them to complete 80 hours of online training modules provided through the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, rather than being trained only in-house by their department. Reserves also must complete 40 hours of supervised field training before becoming fully certified as a reserve officer.

Reserve officers are trained in many of the same areas as full-time law enforcement officers — who receive 636 hours of training over 16 weeks in the academy — but in less detail, according to Brady Carney, director of the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy.

“The minimum requirements to be eligible for certification are essentially the same. It’s more from the training side of things,” Carney said. “It’s honestly just less content for (reserve officers).”

Reserve officers also participate in officer trainings that must be renewed annually and are usually conducted within the department, like firearms training, CPR, mental health training and de-escalation training.

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Some training offered to regular officers isn’t offered to reserve officers because of limitations on what law enforcement duties they can perform.

Reserves aren’t trained to make arrests related to operating a vehicle while under the influence because they don’t have the authority to invoke implied consent. Iowa’s implied consent law states that by driving a vehicle, a person automatically consents to breath tests or other tests meant to determine a person’s blood alcohol level.

Reserve officers also cannot be on-duty serving as a peace officer unless they are being directly supervised by a full-time, certified officer, according to Iowa Code. Reserve officers still can go on patrol by themselves, but must be in constant contact with a fully-certified supervisor, which they can do with portable radios.

What reserve officers spend their time doing varies from department to department. Some departments, including both Linn and Johnson county Sheriff’s Offices, mostly use their reserves as additional coverage for major events, like county fairs.

In Linn County, reserve deputies aren’t allowed to patrol by themselves, even when in constant communication with a supervisor. The only time Linn County reserves patrol without a full-time officer physically with them is when they patrol the Cedar River in a department boat, on the weekends during the summer.

“We use them for a lot of the public events and stuff like that, which would be tough for our regular staff simply because of scheduling and all that other stuff. So, they help us out immensely on programs like that,” said Gerald Hansel, the general services commander for the Linn County Sheriff’s Office.

In Johnson County, reserve deputies can patrol solo, but only after significant additional training, according to Johnson County Sheriff Brad Kunkel.

“Our agency policy is that for reserve deputies, we don’t allow them to carry a firearm until they’ve been with us for a year, and then once you’re firearms qualified, then you can eventually pursue patrol qualification,” Kunkel said. “We want to make sure they get through all of their required trainings, but also that they’re going to be a good fit and that they can pass the certifications that we’re going to have in place to put them out on patrol.”

Some smaller police departments depend more heavily on reserve officers. The Mount Vernon/Lisbon police department, for instance, has eight full-time police officers and six reserve officers, according to the department’s reserve liaison officer, Daniel Daubs.

“The reserves have to work with a full-time officer, so they can’t fully cover a shift. There has to be a full-time officer with them,” Daubs said. The reserves will often work sporting events like high school football games that ask for law enforcement security, or at city festivals, according to Daubs.

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Having reserves “is something that we rely on heavily. It’s a great asset to our department and we value each and every one we have that works for us,” Daubs said. “We’ve not had to work very hard to get reserves. We’ve always had people willing to step in or people wanting to become a part of that, through interactions. Our reserves are always doing a little bit of recruiting as they talk about what they do.”

Not all agencies are having the same amount of luck with recruiting reserve officers, especially in recent years.

John Gahring, the Linn County Sheriff’s Office special deputy in charge of the reserve program, and the president of the Iowa State Reserve Officer Association, said that — just like recruitment for full-time law enforcement — recruiting reserve officers has been getting more difficult.

“As far as the reserve association that I’m president of, our membership keeps dropping, and that’s just because we’re losing reserves everywhere, and that’s throughout the state,” Gahring said.

Like the Mount Vernon/Lisbon department, a lot of departments depend mostly on word-of-mouth for recruitment of reserves. Some departments offer reserve officers an hourly wage based on the time they work, but most departments rely on volunteers.

Volunteer reserve officers are usually required to donate a certain number of hours each month in order to retain their status as reserves, but the amount of time varies from agency to agency. At the Mount Vernon/Lisbon department, and at both Linn and Johnson County Sheriff’s Offices, reserves are required to work at least eight hours per month.

The amount of officers who become certified each year fluctuates. In 2023, so far, 44 new reserve officers and 673 new full-time officers have received their certification.

Iowa Code states that agencies should not supplant their workforce with reserve officers by intentionally avoiding hiring new officers in favor of increasing volunteer numbers. But drawing the line between using reserves as a resource and using them to replace full-time officers can be tricky, according to Carney, with the Law Enforcement Academy.

“It’s one of those things with the spirit of the law, looking at the intent behind it, and intent is sometimes really difficult to decipher,” Carney said, adding that departments shouldn’t be “intentionally avoiding hiring someone because they have a reserve program built up, or reserve capability. But again, that’s tough, and we obviously trust the agencies to do the right thing.”

For agencies like the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, which is currently looking to recruit more reserve officers, reserves don’t replace full-time officers, but do provide relief when it comes to working overtime to cover community events.

“We rely heavily on our reserves to fulfill the needs and demands that we have across the county. We're a busy sheriff's office … if we didn't have a robust roster of reserves available, we’d have to rely more on paying overtime to our full-time staff, and probably a lot of it would be even forced over time,” Kunkel said. “The reserve unit really helps us provide our full-time staff with adequate time off so they can work their regular shifts, but also it gives the reserves an opportunity to work, to serve in the community and for us to meet those demands.”

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