Breaking Rank (34 page)

       
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Teamwork

       
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Adaptability/flexibility

       
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Conscientiousness/dependability

       
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Impulse control/attention to safety

       
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Integrity/ethics

       
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Emotional regulation and stress tolerance

       
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Decision making and judgment

       
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Assertiveness/persuasiveness

       
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Avoiding substance abuse and other risk-taking behavior

The panel is also developing a long list of “
counterproductive
behaviors,” and expressing each in ways that make it easier to test for walking landmines. You really don't want a cop in your neighborhood who:

            
Baits people . . . takes personal offense at comments, insults, criticism . . . provokes suspects by officious bearing, gratuitous verbal exchange, or through physical contact . . . antagonizes community members and others . . . gossips, criticizes, and backstabs colleagues and coworkers . . . is paralyzed by uncertainty or ambiguity . . . sneaks out before shift is over . . . brandishes [or] is otherwise careless with firearms . . . gets in off-duty altercations . . . lies, misrepresents and commits perjury . . . steals . . . engages in inappropriate sexual activity (e.g., prostitutes, sex with minors, etc.) . . . is
overly
suspicious and distrusting in dealing with others . . . comes “unglued,” freezes, or otherwise performs ineffectively when feeling overloaded or stressed . . . is naïve, overly trusting, easily duped . . . displays submissiveness and insecurity when confronting challenging or threatening situations . . . commits domestic violence . . .”

By framing these traits in
behavioral
terms, and by developing new measures and instruments to test for them, screeners can do a much better job of keeping both the goons and the “naïve, overly trusting, easily duped” out of a police uniform.

There are four basic issues on which the law enforcement community is divided when it comes to picking new cops. How old is old enough? How much education is necessary? Is military experience an advantage? And, how much dope-smoking is too much?

The typical minimum age requirement is twenty-one, with a few agencies, like Chicago, setting it at twenty-three. But a handful of cities allow eighteen-year-olds to become cops. Now, that's just plain stupid. Developmentally, your average teenager is simply not ready to exercise life-and-death decision-making authority. If your city's officials are putting children in police uniforms, please tell them to stop. If they refuse, recall them.

Most agencies require a high school diploma or GED equivalent. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 15 percent of local PDs require some form of higher education, with sixty semester units the norm.

In 1979, I proposed that the city require all SDPD candidates to have an associate degree or sixty semester units or more of higher education from an accredited college or university. I believed then and still do that higher education, preferably in the liberal arts, gives a candidate an edge over a non-college-educated applicant. It's not so much the
product
of the learning but the
process
of matriculation that produces the advantage: setting out a program, declaring a major, picking courses, enduring the registration nightmare, getting up in the morning for classes or attending at night after work, reading dense texts, writing term papers, questioning professors, associating with people and ideas that force you to think, taking midterms and finals. The
politics
of higher education, the discipline of learning
how
to learn—that was the most useful thing about higher ed. Not the degree, not the units.

The city accepted the proposal. But two years later we had to abandon the requirement when the pool of eligible ethnic minorities all but dried up. (The number of women candidates was unaffected.) For college-educated ethnic minorities, police work simply couldn't compete with the pay or the cachet of the private sector. Or was it because of the “blue-collarness” of police work, or the image of policing in the black community? Or the dangers and strains of life as a cop? We dropped the requirement, the pool filled back up.

It's a tough call, but unless a department in a multicultural community is able to reflect that community's diversity within its ranks, I'd oppose a
post–high school educational requirement. And look for ways to “incentivize” a career in policing.

I said earlier that tenured cops in big cities ought to be bringing home $100K a year. But what do they make? According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average salary of a police officer in 2002 was $42,270. The middle 50 percent earned between $32,300 and $53,500. The highest 10 percent earned more than $65,330 and the lowest 10 percent less than $25,220. An NYPD officer makes $54,048. (Elsewhere in the state, in Suffolk and Nassau Counties, top pay has reached almost $85,000—with some Suffolk County cops bringing home over $100,000 when you throw in longevity pay, shift differentials, and other add-ons. This, of course, has made NYPD a choice training ground for those other agencies.)

A lot of people think being a cop and being a soldier are
interchangeable,
that honorably discharged military personnel would make super cops. Just because they've served in the
armed
forces and worn a
uniform.
This is nonsense, of course.

There are huge differences in the everyday existence of a soldier vis-à-vis a cop (not to mention profound variances in the geography and political systems against which each occupation is set). Also, being a soldier in wartime is a hell of a lot more dangerous than being a city cop. Military personnel are trained to kill, to inflict pain, and some can't seem to turn it off. Those four or five soldiers who killed their wives at Ft. Bragg are a case in point, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib another. While it would be both morally wrong and shortsighted to generalize based on these horrors, it does suggest the need for a rigorous check for such tendencies during the selection process.

My position is simple: judge each candidate, with or without military experience, against the standards set for the job. Some of the best cops I worked with were military veterans who brought to the work a maturity, self-discipline, and loyalty to the principles of ethical policing that some nonservice personnel lacked.

Drugs? I remember the day we learned SDPD was going to start accepting candidates who'd smoked pot. It was scandalous! Of course, it was also the late sixties: if the department refused to hire ex-pot smokers we'd have three people sitting in the academy classroom instead of forty.

A few years later, the doors were opened to cokesters. The test was whether you were a user or an “experimenter.” Those who'd tried cocaine had to have been clean and sober for three years. Potheads? Twelve months.

Those standards fluctuated a bit over time, in San Diego and elsewhere, as we coped with the cultural reality that millions of young folk had at least dabbled in a variety of banned substances. We stuck to our guns on certain drugs: no hallucinogens (the literature was full of tales of years-after LSD flashbacks) and no “injectibles.”

Despite my “relaxed” attitude about social drug use I'm rigid on the topic of cops who use. I say just say no: Cities must reject candidates who went far beyond youthful experimentation, or who've used recently. They're not worth the risk.

Bill Kolender used to tell his recruiters, “Bring me
good
people, damn it! I can't make chicken soup out of chicken shit.” Picking the right people starts with rounding them up in the first place, and “role model” cops of all colors, both genders, straight and gay do it best.

Critical to the success of police recruitment is specialized training for the recruiters, as well as a modern, well-crafted, adequately financed recruitment or “marketing” strategy. Not to be overlooked in the campaign: officers out on the beat. They are an
excellent
source of new blood. I gave my cops a day off with pay when they recruited a successful candidate.