Hiring for Metro police force begins this year. Officers to work with crisis teams, chief says

Los Angeles Metro's new chief of police says collaboration between sworn officers and unarmed responders will ultimately be what "makes or breaks" the public safety agency he is building for one of the nation's largest public transit systems.

“One needs the other to be effective in this model,” said Chief Bill Scott, who joined Metro in May after leading the San Francisco Police Department for eight years.

Scott spoke with LAist on Tuesday, saying the new Metro Department of Public Safety expects to begin hiring police officers this fall.

The interview came the same week Metro announced the establishment of the department’s “care-based services division,” which houses the neon green-clad ambassadors, homeless outreach and an emerging team of behavioral health responders under one central authority. Previously, those teams were spread across departments within the agency.

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The background

Metro’s Board of Directors approved a plan in June 2024 to stand up its own in-house public safety department, replacing the decades-old system of outsourcing law enforcement to regional police agencies.

A year after the board approved the public safety overhaul, Scott joined Metro as the agency’s first chief of police and emergency management.

Before his time with the San Francisco Police Department, Scott served with the LAPD for 27 years.

Scott said Metro's Department of Public Safety has secured vendors to help recruit and vet new officers and hopes to have its recruitment strategy solidified by the spring. Scott said the department is working on agreements with police training academies and finalizing training curriculum.

“ There's a lot of moving parts to [our] plan, and we have a lot of foundational things that we have to get done fairly quickly,” Scott said. “Some of those are well on the way.”

Scott added that he supports initiatives that were already in place before he joined Metro, including the installation of taller fare gates and tap-to-exit.

Police recruitment remains a challenge

At some point in 2029, Metro hopes it will have a full force of around 400 sworn officers. As they are incrementally hired, Metro will whittle down the number of regional law enforcement officers it contracts.

Scott acknowledged that since the nationwide reckoning with policing in 2020, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported issues with staffing.

Police agencies with more than 250 sworn officers reported a staffing drop of 6% from 2020 to 2025, according to a survey last year from the Police Executive Research Forum. Though the survey results indicate signs of improvement as large police agencies saw an increase in hiring in 2024 compared to 2023.

“ Our plan is to build enough excitement about what we're doing to get people to apply, and then we're able to pick people that are aligned with our values,” Scott said.

Internal Metro surveys show upward of 500 people already working for the agency, including bus and rail operators and ambassadors, are interested in becoming sworn officers, Scott said.

“If we get even 10% of those employees the first year, that’s a huge boost for what we’re trying to do,” Scott said. “To have that type of interest is really encouraging.”

The ‘care-based services division’

Part of the training sworn officers will receive from Metro includes how to work with the hundreds of unarmed personnel who round out the department.

Metro riders likely will be familiar with some of those teams. They have been working on the system for several years and include the ambassadors, who help with wayfinding and can administer opioid overdose-reversing drugs, and homelessness outreach workers.

One new team Metro is bringing on board will be made up of clinicians who respond to behavioral health episodes on trains and buses.

Once fully set up, Craig Joyce, a Metro executive and social worker who will lead the new care-based services division, said the department will be able to triage calls for help and send out appropriate teams.

“ If [the dispatcher] hears the words ‘mental health,’ perhaps they send out the crisis response team versus an ambassador team or versus a sworn officer set,” said Joyce, who previously worked on the agency’s homeless outreach efforts. “If there's a serious situation that's occurring, where there's a safety issue, but it's also a mental health [issue], a crisis response co-responder team could go out, where there's a clinician, a peer specialist, but also an officer to manage the safety side of things.”