Applicant pool rises for Philadelphia police after non-residents allowed to apply

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

Two months after City Council passed a bill allowing the city to hire nonresidents, the pool of applicants who want to be Philadelphia police officers has more than doubled.

The city personnel department said that 4,967 applicants took the recruit exam last Saturday, a 134 percent increase over a year ago, when 2,125 were tested.

Of the people who applied to take the exam, 39 percent were non-residents, according to the department.

Commanders greeted the explosion of job-seekers with glee after watching the pool of applicants shrink in recent years. Officials here were particularly irked that police departments from New York and other jurisdictions frequently visited Philadelphia to seek criminal-justice majors at Temple University and other local colleges, many of whom were off-limits to city police because of the residency restrictions.

"I'm not saying that people from Philadelphia aren't great, but we're going to get a better pool of applicants," said Capt. Frederick Cotton, head of the recruitment unit.

The only reason to have a residency requirement is to run a patronage operation.