The importance of a comprehensive, goal-oriented personnel management program for a police organization is emphasized. Systematic planning should encompass projections of personnel requirements in qualitative, quantitative, logistic, and temporal terms. Career development, inservice training, and staff organization, coordination, and motivation should likewise be systematically programmed. Implantation of such long-range personnel management approaches has been hampered in law enforcement agencies because they are regulated by law and must constantly respond to unforeseen, short-range needs arising from social and political changes. However, police personnel planners must prepare for competitive, aggressive recruiting in the 1980's, when Germany will experience a serious shortage of manpower. Rapid technological advances quickly render specific kills and earlier training obsolescent. Therefore, personnel management emphasis must be on such supradisciplinary abilities as teamwork, leadership, human relations, and communications. Innovative career ladders and job satisfaction strategies must forestall lower ranking officers from dropping out because of limited opportunities for advancement into administrative posts. North Rhine-Westphalia alone will require over 2,000 new recruits yearly. Personnel marketing techniques, including police needs assessments and demographic studies of the work market, must be adopted. To ensure both numbers and the quality of candidates, vigorous outreach to the school-age generation must be pursued. A news clipping on the nationwide manpower shortage and tabular data are appended.