It’s been said that hiring a police chief is one of the most important decisions a city manager can make. Unfortunately, many default to quantitative benchmarks like population, square mileage, or number of officers supervised. These traditional measures are familiar and seemingly objective, but mounting evidence suggests they are poor predictors of leadership effectiveness. Potential chief applicants have no control over the size of their city or how many people live there. What truly matters is how a chief performs, and past performance is perhaps the most useful marker for future performance.

During my career, I’ve observed highly capable and forward-thinking leaders passed over for police chief roles because their current or previous jurisdictions were considered “too small” or “not comparable.” The implication is that performance in a city of 20,000 says little about one’s capacity to lead a city of 100,000 or more. Yet this mindset ignores a critical truth: leaders don’t control the scale of their environment, but they do control how they lead within it.

ICMA has conducted extensive research on municipal public safety staffing and operations, analyzing cities of all sizes. Their findings consistently show that per-capita staffing models and population-based assumptions offer limited insight into organizational workload, community needs, and executive capacity.

In one study of 61 municipalities, ICMA found that peak call volumes, seasonal trends, and community expectations were far better indicators of resource demand than crime rates or headcount. What’s more, they emphasized that effective leadership is less about managing a large number of people and more about managing the right systems, building the right culture, and delivering the right outcomes.

In 2020, ICMA and the International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR) launched the Chief Selection Advantage, a DOJ-funded initiative aimed at modernizing the police chief selection process. They concluded that municipalities still rely on unstructured interviews, vague job descriptions, and scale-based comparisons that overlook the very competencies that matter most in a contemporary chief: ethical leadership, reform-mindedness, emotional intelligence, and the ability to engage and earn the trust of diverse communities.

That’s where competency-based hiring enters the conversation. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has long advocated for structured, performance-oriented recruitment for executive roles. In a recent survey, 67% of HR professionals cited poorly defined job expectations as a primary reason for failed hires. Competency frameworks, when implemented correctly, offer a clear way to align candidate strengths with organizational goals.

There is also quantifiable evidence that this approach works. Municipalities that have shifted to performance-based hiring for executive roles reported, on average, a 22% improvement in organizational alignment and an 18% increase in community trust scores within two years. These are not small gains. In policing, where public trust is essential, this kind of improvement is transformative.

Still, many local governments hesitate to implement these practices. Some face resource constraints and lack the internal HR expertise to build and apply structured selection frameworks. Others are constrained by institutional inertia: long-standing promotion systems based on tenure and rank that resist change. And some city managers simply fear the risk. Hiring a police chief is a high-stakes decision. When faced with pressure to avoid controversy or get it “right,” decision-makers may fall back on the familiar: someone who has led a similarly sized department.

These are real barriers, but not insurmountable ones. Cities can begin by engaging stakeholders, elected officials, community members, and staff in defining the qualities they want in a police chief. ICMA, IACP, and SHRM all offer publicly available resources to support this process. Structured interviews, behavioral assessments, blind resume reviews, and external facilitation can help mitigate bias and ensure a more robust, equitable process.

City managers should challenge themselves to ask different questions: not “How many officers have you supervised?” but “How have you earned the trust of your community?” Not “What was your city’s size?” but “What did you do with the resources you had?”

Selecting a police chief is one of the most consequential decisions a city manager can make. It is not enough to choose someone who has “been there before.” We must choose someone who has delivered results—someone whose leadership, not their jurisdiction size, tells the real story. In doing so, we’ll help ensure that the future of policing is shaped not by tradition or convenience, but by competence, integrity, and vision.

J.T. MANOUSHAGIAN is chief of the Lake Worth Police Department in Lake Worth, Texas, USA.