Law enforcement agencies across the country experienced a wave of retirements and departures and are struggling to recruit the next generation of police officers in the year since George Floyd was killed by a cop. And amid the national reckoning on policing, communities are questioning who should become a police officer today. Nationwide protests and calls for reforming and defunding the police, as well as the coronavirus pandemic, took their toll on officer morale. New research on nearly 200 law enforcement agencies conducted by the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum and provided to The Associated Press shows the rate of retirements at some departments rose 45% compared with the previous year.