Pubdate: Mon, 27 Mar 2006
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A01 - Front Page
Copyright: 2006 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: John Pomfret, Washington Post Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?246 (Policing - United States)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Marijuana)

POLICE FINDING IT HARD TO FILL JOBS

Forces Use Perks and Alter Standards

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Police departments around the country are
contending with a shortage of officers and trying to lure new
applicants with signing bonuses, eased standards, house down payments
and extra vacation time.

 From this seaside Southern California city to Washington's suburbs,
more than 80 percent of the nation's 17,000 law enforcement agencies,
big and small, have vacancies that many can't fill, police officials
estimate.

"I was just at a conference of police chiefs," said William Bratton,
the chief of police in Los Angeles, which has 720 openings. "It was
all everybody was talking about."

Police officials and researchers say a confluence of demographic
changes and social trends have precipitated the shortage. The wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan have siphoned off public-service-minded people to
the military. Hundreds of law enforcement officers have handed in
their badges to take higher-paying positions in the booming homeland
security industry.

And each year an increasingly large number of baby-boomer officers,
hired in the 1970s, retires. The labor pool in the next generation is
smaller, further cutting the number of prospective applicants.

The younger generation is better educated than its predecessor, so a
career in policing, where the average starting salary is $32,000, is
not as attractive as it was before.

Prince William, Fairfax and Loudoun counties all have recently
instituted programs -- signing bonuses, bounties for county employees
recommending successful candidates, and pay increases -- designed to
keep their police departments intact.

In the District, officials said they have noticed increased
competition for applicants but are not facing a shortage. But Prince
George's County began a $1 million advertising campaign last summer
touting police work as exciting and challenging in the hope of
boosting its chronically understaffed ranks. The force is 60 officers
short of its authorized complement of 1,420 officers.

Elsewhere, departments have dropped their zero-tolerance policy on
drug use and past gang association, eased restrictions on applicants
with bad credit ratings, and tweaked physical requirements to make
room for more female candidates or smaller male candidates, police
officials said. Departments also offer crash courses in reading and
remedial English for the written parts of the entrance exam, and
provide strength and agility coaches for the physical part -- all of
which have raised concerns about how qualified some of the new
personnel will be.

"We no longer say if you've smoked marijuana five times, you can't be
in the LAPD," said Cmdr. Kenneth Garner, who runs recruitment for the
Los Angeles Police Department. "If we did that, I'd be sitting in this
office by myself. But we really take a hard look at honesty."

In the past, some recruitment drives have resulted in questionable
hiring. In 1989 and 1990, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department,
seeking to quell a crime wave, mistakenly hired numerous gang members
and people with substantial criminal histories and drug and credit
problems. Some were later implicated in questionable police shootings.

Experts said that while they hope the inherently conservative nature
of law enforcement agencies will protect against a slew of bad hires,
there is a concern that with a smaller pool of applicants,
less-qualified people are becoming police officers.

"That is clearly a concern, and police chiefs are very uneasy about
that possibility," said Hubert Williams, president of the Police
Foundation, a law enforcement advocacy group. "The question is, do we
keep our radio cars empty or hire people who a few years ago we
wouldn't have hired? It is very problematic."

Williams said that some departments are hiring applicants with
criminal records. "A few years ago, an arrest record was a deal
breaker," he said. "Now departments are asking whether someone is
salvageable."

To fill the void, police recruiters are fanning out across the
country. When layoffs were announced in the automotive industry in
Detroit, recruiters flocked there to try to sign up furloughed
assembly-line workers. Police recruiters comb the beaches of Florida,
California and Texas during spring break and conduct ad campaigns --
on billboards, in newspapers, on radio and TV -- at a level
unprecedented in the history of U.S. policing.

Police officials say the shortage of police officers has hit law
enforcement agencies west of the Mississippi particularly hard because
they historically have carried smaller staffs. For example, New York
City has twice as many people as Los Angeles but nearly four times as
many police -- about 37,000, compared with L.A.'s 9,600 -- and last
week announced plans to hire 800 more.

In Texas, the need for law enforcement officers is so great that
Dallas, Austin and Houston are in the midst of a bidding war to hire
veteran officers, with Houston recently upping its bonus to $7,000.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, one of the country's
more aggressive recruiters, recently drew the line on tattoos,
branding and body piercing -- but left some wiggle room. If the body
art can be covered by a long-sleeved shirt and pants, then
applications are still welcome.

To find new recruits, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department has
offered a $500 bounty to county employees who find applicants who
become deputies. The sheriff's department, like many agencies, used to
frown on transfers from other departments, but now such lateral hires
are given a signing bonus of $5,000.

Mike Farrell was lured over to the San Diego County Sheriff's
Department from the San Diego city police force in December. The
six-year police veteran got $5,000 to sign, better hours, the chance
to clock more overtime and the promise of a fatter pension when he
retires. The San Diego city government is tottering toward bankruptcy,
so law enforcement recruiters from around the country, including
Honolulu and Phoenix (which is sweetening its offer with a down
payment on a house), have been picking over its force. Of Farrell's
original squad of six on the city police force, he said, only two remain.

"When I first started applying, there were 100 applicants as qualified
as I was," said Farrell, 33. "Now they are having a hard time finding
25 to 30 people like that."

In past decades, police departments were hampered by budget cuts. But
now, even when there is adequate funding, cities can't find enough
cops. In 2004, voters in Oakland approved a $9 million tax increase to
hire 63 additional officers to increase the ranks of that police
department to 802. Today the city is nowhere close to meeting its
recruitment goal because there are not enough suitable applicants.

"People are not as equipped or as inclined to be police officers as in
the past," said Barbara Raymond, who has researched the police
shortage for Rand Corp. "There's more drug use, there's a more
sedentary lifestyle. People are more in debt and overweight."

"What you are really talking about is a major national shortage in a
variety of sectors -- teachers, firefighters, nurses and police
officers," said Williams, the Police Foundation president. "Corporate
America can move across the world to find people to work in its
factories. But there are some things that you can't outsource." And
unlike the nursing industry, which has attracted thousands of overseas
applicants to the United States, most, if not all, police departments
require candidates to be U.S. citizens.

Policing also has changed, Raymond noted in her report for Rand. The
job is far from the adrenaline-packed hook 'em and book 'em, car chase
stereotype of the past. As cities around the nation become more
culturally diverse and police departments embrace community policing
tactics, officers are often pushed to deal with the root causes of
crime, becoming more social worker than cop.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, have put new stresses on police work. In
Long Beach, for example, the terrorist attacks prompted the department
of 1,000 officers to create its first counterterrorism unit and a
special port unit. To do it, Long Beach reduced foot patrols, cut
staffing in the narcotics division and switched most officers from
two-person to one-person patrol cars.

There are concerns, said Elaine Deck, a researcher at the
International Association of Chiefs of Police, that staffing changes
and shortages could affect public safety and the well-being of law
enforcement officers. The LAPD, for example, is too short-staffed to
investigate complaints against its officers, so that many complaints
from 2005 may not result in punishment until this year.

"When you have single officers in vehicles, a lack of backup, slower
response time, cuts in prevention programs and fewer school resource
officers, things obviously could be affected," Deck said. Also, with
fewer recruits entering the system and a large number of veterans
exiting, officers' street knowledge -- critical to effective law
enforcement -- is evaporating. It used to take 10 years to make
sergeant. Now in many bigger departments, people are getting
promotions after only two.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake