The Haitian National Police faced an acute recruitment and retention crisis in 2023, with deaths, dismissals, and resignations reducing the force’s size at a time when it desperately needed to expand its capacity. The combination of physical danger, inadequate pay, poor equipment, and the psychological burden of fighting a losing battle against better-armed criminal networks was driving experienced officers out of the institution and discouraging new recruits from joining.
Officers who resigned described their decision in straightforward terms: they had joined to serve their communities but found themselves unable to do so effectively, in constant danger, and inadequately supported by a government that could not reliably pay their salaries or provide the equipment they needed. The calculation that staying in the police was both dangerous and professionally futile was, for many, simply rational.
Recruitment of new officers was constrained by the same factors. Young Haitians who might have considered a police career looked at the conditions their colleagues faced — undertrained, under-equipped, underpaid, and outgunned — and chose other paths. The pool of willing recruits for a force that could not offer reliable safety or competitive compensation was limited.
International partners supporting police reform acknowledged the recruitment and retention crisis and called for emergency salary support and improved working conditions as a precondition for any meaningful expansion of police capacity. They argued that training programs and equipment provision were valuable but insufficient if the institution could not retain the officers it trained and could not recruit enough new officers to replace those leaving. The human resource dimension of police reform was as important as the technical and equipment dimensions.