Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  •Police officers would be given everything they need to get the job done properly and safely. Their equipment and working conditions would be monitored constantly, with deficiencies attended to promptly. They would be compensated at a level commensurate with the danger and sensitivity of their roles in society—in today’s market, a hundred thousand dollars is not unreasonable.

  But can a police officer working in a “demilitarized” police force spring into military-like action as needed? Is it possible, psychologically, for that officer to make a smooth, rapid transition from a “democratic” cop to a compliant member of, say, an assault team headed into a public school to take out a shooter?

  Absolutely. Good cops do it all the time, morphing from discretionary social problem-solver to armed tactician. The sad thing is they do it with little, if any, help from their rigid, myopic organizations. Imagine the improvements, across the board, if the system itself expected and facilitated such progressive police behavior?

  A word of caution. If you’re a reformer bent on rearranging the way your PD’s molecules are organized, best keep this in mind: If you push a system, it will push back—with equal or greater force. The status quo has powerful defenders who can get downright vicious when cornered. Proceed slowly, build support, and be as respectful as you are tough. And forget about calling sergeants “advisors.”

  CHAPTER 17

  PICKING GOOD COPS

  WE’D BEEN AT IT for weeks. Most of the candidates had long before started looking and sounding alike. Why do you want to be a police officer? “To help people.” What makes you think you’d be a good cop? “I like people.” What’s your strongest quality? “I’d have to say my people skills.” Your weakest? “Well, my friends say I work too hard.” We needed some comic relief, Jon Murphy and I. Murphy was a personnel analyst. I was, as a lieutenant, SDPD’s representative on the civil service oral board. We’d heard the same mind-numbing themes from over two hundred people.

  Our salvation came in the form of a recently discharged Marine, currently working as a rent-a-cop. Murphy was asking the questions. Why had the candidate left the Marines? “Too lax, sir,” he said. Murphy and I exchanged glances. His current job? How did he like working for a security company? “It’s okay, but my mission in life is to be a policeman.” Could he tell us a little something about his current job we might find interesting? “Yes, sir. Just last week I was working the sports arena, the Rolling Stones concert? A big fight broke out on my side of the parking lot.” What did you do? “Well, I caught this punk who was getting ready to chuck a bottle at the policemen.” What did you do with him? “Nothing, sir,” he said, snarling and nodding in my direction. “One of your people came along. He made me turn the punk over to him.” Ah, but what would you have liked to do? “Liked to do?” Be honest now. “Sir, I would like to have knocked him on his ass.” Yes, yes. Then what?

  Our candidate stood up, the look in his eyes causing me to pat my right side to make sure my weapon was where it was supposed to be. The guy put his hands on the table and lifted his right leg. “Then I would’ve kicked him in the face!” He brought his foot down so hard the thud echoed off the metal walls. He lifted the foot again and brought it down, harder. “I’d kick that commie hippie’s face over and over and over!” His foot came down, over and over and over, his eyes bulging from their sockets, beet-red cheeks puffed up like a blowfish. “Over and over and . . .”

  When he left the room, Murphy and I took out our rating sheets. We agreed, straight down the line. Today that man is a police chief in . . . just kidding. We did get our comic relief, but the candidate’s over-the-top performance made me stop and think: about the slicker aspirants, the glib sadists and smooth sociopaths who are drawn to the work.

  Of course, we saw candidates at the other end of the spectrum: people who spoke barely above a whisper, still lived at home, taught Sunday school, had never been employed, never been in a fight, never fired a gun, never had sex or tasted whiskey. People who’d faint dead away at the sight of blood.

  Some people, most people, are not cut out to be a cop. If honest and otherwise morally upright, they’re either too aggressive or not aggressive enough; insensitive or overly sensitive; rigid as rebar or lacking a spine altogether. I think back to my own candidacy, and give thanks that SDPD was hard up for cops at the moment—and that there was no psychological screening in those days.

  I’d grown up a frightened, neurotic kid, afraid of just about everything. Dad’s fists, his belt. Women’s screams. Sirens. Gunfire. Schoolyard fights. I’d played sports, desperate to prove to myself I wasn’t afraid, but it didn’t work—I lived in terror of being crushed by a linebacker, elbowed by a power forward, beaned by a fastball.

  For years I had a major preoccupation with death, my death. I don’t mean I’d planned to kill myself. But there were ways it could just happen to you. You could, for example, accidentally hang yourself from the pepper tree in the backyard, or take a sip from a vial whose skull and crossbones you’d not seen until too late. Or step on a rusty nail and get lockjaw. Or get shot by a bullet on the way to the Boys Club, run over by a speeding car, stabbed by a knife, slashed with a straight razor, run through with a samurai sword. You could slip from the roof of the El Cortez on prom night, get trapped in a blazing elevator, or tossed into a fire ring at the beach in Coronado. A burglar could cover your face with a pillow and suffocate you. Your brother Roy could drop the radio into your bath water. You could get ripped apart by a grizzly in the Rockies or bitten by a rabid Rottweiler. “Happy,” the crazy guy who hung around Kimball Park, he could whack your head off with an ax.

  See what I mean? I was hardly your ideal cop candidate. Like many other screwed up kids who go on to become police officers, I used the job, or it used me, to work out all kinds of developmental and emotional challenges. I figure upwards of a hundred San Diegans paid a price for my on-the-job “therapy” during my rookie year alone.

  Ultimately, I did grow on the job, evolving into a pretty good, if somewhat controversial, cop.

  But I wouldn’t have hired me.

  So, how did it happen? Well, I passed through all the “gates” the civil service system and department placed in my path: written exam, oral interview, medical, physical fitness, polygraph, background investigation. Also, I was a warm body with a pulse. And, as I said, SDPD was hurting at the time.

  Nowhere in the country is police experience necessary to apply for and pass a civil service test for the entry-level position: patrol officer. Just basic communication skills, decent medical and physical condition, a level head, and a moral compass that points north.

  More and more cities are having their candidates complete a behaviorally anchored, empirically validated paper-and-pencil test, provide a sample of writing skills, and watch a video of realistically staged police incidents after which they answer questions about how they’d handle each. Not a bad way to go. Certainly an improvement over the “general intelligence” test I took in 1965. Culturally biased against ethnic minorities and not even close to being job-related, it got bounced years later for those very reasons.

  Candidates who survive the written test are interviewed, typically by a police supervisor or manager, a community rep, and a civil service analyst. They’re asked many of the same questions I was asked: motivation for the position; background experiences; self-perceived strengths and weaknesses; and what he or she would do if he or she witnessed another cop steal a candy bar. Or a Rolex.

  After the written and the oral comes the medical exam. Today’s are more rigorous than in my day.

  “Jump up and down fifteen times on your left foot,” said Dr. Brown. “Good, good. Now fifteen times on your right foot. Good, good.” He took my pulse, which he’d done just before all the jumping, then wrote down a number. I remember that part well, because I failed it. Tachycardia they called it, “unsatisfactory exercise tolerance.” I worked out daily for a month, laid off the beer, ordered no pizzas or subs at Mike & Joe’
s, came back and passed on my second attempt.

  Most of us in the applicant pool had known exactly what to expect from the medical. Dr. Brown, a kindly man, was a creature of routine. He tested our hearing, for example, by standing behind us and whispering “66 . . . 99”—same numbers, same order, every candidate. In addition to checking our hearing and having us jump up and down, he drew blood, took our blood pressure, and had us turn our heads and cough. That was it. Still, his exam was a lot more thorough than that of the “police surgeon,” three weeks later.

  An archaic position even then, the police surgeon’s main job was to conduct forensic medical examinations of rape and other assault victims (it’s contracted out today). Working out of a tiny office next to the jail, Doc Williams was also responsible for the PD’s in-house applicant “medicals.” His signature was required before you could move on to the next step.

  Doc Williams was a gruff, impatient bastard. I was in and out of his office in under a minute, and never took my clothes off. “You flatfooted?” he said.

  “No.”

  “What color’s that green box?”

  “Green?”

  “Next!”

  Today’s physical fitness testing has been reduced to a science (with the “Cooper Test” out of Texas setting the national standard). On the whole, it’s an easier test—but more job-related. In most cities, you do eighteen pushups within a minute, twenty-seven sit-ups within a minute, and a mile and a half run within fifteen minutes and twenty seconds. I’m no Jack Palance, but I can double those standards, even today.

  The polygraph? By far the most controversial step in the process. The reliability of “lie detection” has been questioned by experts. Its results are not admissible in court, it has been discontinued by many agencies, and its use in preemployment screening has actually been outlawed in a number of states.

  I remember my visit to “the box” in late 1965. Word had spread throughout the applicant pool: No matter what you’ve done, no matter how humiliating, for chrissakes cop to it: It’s all over if they catch you in a lie. The conventional wisdom was that you might be able to fool the detective who ran the machine but you couldn’t fool the box.

  I walked into an office on the second floor of the detective bureau, having no knowledge of how the machine worked. I didn’t know it measured blood pressure, pulse rate, respiration, muscle movements, and “galvanic skin response” (sweating). For all I knew a loud buzzer would go off if I fibbed. I wasn’t aware that the polygraph occasionally produces a “false positive,” that it might, in other words, catch me lying when I was telling the truth. Or vice versa. Civil service and PD personnel had convinced me that the lie detector was 100 percent accurate.

  A detective in a white short-sleeve shirt motioned me into a chair next to the box. He asked a lot of time-consuming questions about my application, simple stuff: the spelling of my name, my address, work history, and so on. Then he hooked me up. He asked the same questions all over again. I couldn’t see the lines on the graph but I didn’t hear any buzzers or bells. “Okay,” he said. “That’s it.” That’s it? I’m out of here? “Now,” he said with some enthusiasm. “Let’s get to the good stuff.”

  For the next half hour he asked every kind of personal question you can imagine. Sex. Drugs. Alcohol. Family. Finances. How I spent or misspent my youth. Crimes I may have committed, my driving record, medical history. Relations with friends, coworkers, neighbors. He went over my application in detail, my body doing its thing, signifying on his graph. Finally, he unhooked me.

  “So, how’d I do?” I said. Despite all the dire warnings, I’d decided to fudge the truth a bit about my trick knee. I guess I’d figured it was worth the crapshoot: the injury was definitely a disqualifier. Maybe I could put one over on the machine just this once . . .

  “I’ll never tell,” he said. And he never did. Polygraph operators were sworn to secrecy, the results of their examinations confidential. Only the chief’s office, he told me, would get the results.* I never heard a word, good or bad, about how I did.

  Forty years later, cities like San Diego still use the polygraph. But what do we know about its accuracy, it usefulness in screening police candidates? The 245-page report of the National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that the polygraph “error” rate in standard employment screening is terribly high: about thirty percent false positives or false negatives. But the American Polygraph Association asserts, self-servingly, that in over 250 studies during the past twenty-five years, the accuracy rate of polygraph examinations hovers around perfection, give or take zero percent. In fairness to the APA, they do not consider an “inconclusive” finding to be an error—while critics of the polygraph do. I’m siding with the APA on this one. How can inconclusive (or “I don’t know”) be construed as an error? Inconclusive is inconclusive.

  Sociopaths believe their lies, professional spies have been taught to lie. For everybody else? The polygraph’s greatest value just might be psychological. It scares candidates into telling the truth.

  The very best assessment of a police applicant’s fitness comes from incumbent police officers, in the form of competent, well-trained background investigators. The kind of cops you’d want to show up at your door if your car’s been ripped off, or your kid molested.

  Many cities are grossly negligent when it comes to background investigations. They don’t assign enough investigators. They fail to provide critical training. They don’t furnish computers, software, office space, and/or other essential tools. They won’t foot the bill to put a backgrounder on a plane so that the core of the investigation can be carried out on the candidate’s home turf.

  Scrimp on background investigations, you’ll wind up hiring check artists, dope dealers, gang members, and other assorted fugitives from justice. The Mellon Commission (1994) found that an incredible 88 percent of 413 officers fired or suspended for corruption in New York had entered the NYPD academy before completion of their background checks. (I don’t know why that statistic surprises me: I wasn’t backgrounded until weeks after I’d been hired. But least I was still in the classroom when it was finally accomplished.) In New York, a third of those new hires were on the streets before they’d had their background investigations completed. Such investigations would have revealed that 24 percent of those cops had a criminal arrest record.

  New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Diego, Seattle, and countless other cities have at one time or another tried to hire too many people too fast.

  You pay a price when you sacrifice quality for speed. Every single time, guaranteed.

  It’s not all that hard to keep crooks out of a police department. A simple check of names, dates of birth, social security numbers, and fingerprints against local, regional, and the National Crime Information Center databases will do the trick. But only if you take the time to do it. (And if the crooked candidate has a police record. Bulletin: Not all crooks get caught.)

  There’s no substitute for a shoe-leather investigation that brings you face-to-face with former employers, coworkers, spouses, ex-spouses, other intimate partners, former teachers, neighbors, people who’ve had close contact with the candidate. A competent background investigation turns up all kinds of juicy information that otherwise would have not made it to the desk of the appointing authority. For example: a candidate with no criminal record who routinely beat his live-in girlfriend and threatened to kill her if she reported him (she never did, but our background investigator, going door to door, pried the history from a neighbor); a woman who’d been embezzling from her employer (a trusting individual who’d ignored his suspicions until the cops came knocking on his door); a man whose “paper trail”—employment, education, other biographical data—was stellar but whose interpersonal skills, as described by coworkers, would make Don Rickles seem like Mister Rogers; a California man who, using the address of a brother-in-law, did all his major shopping
(household appliances, boats, campers, automobiles) in Oregon, thereby avoiding state sales tax—and committing fraud; and a man who would get drunk, pin his wife to the bed, and rape her at least once a week.

  Background investigations are also how one learns whether the candidate has met the most basic requirements of the job: age, citizenship, education, possession of a valid driver’s license, the absence of felony or domestic violence convictions, an honorable discharge from the military.

  Psychological testing is critical, indispensable in fact. Dr. David Corey, a renowned police psychologist based in Oregon and an expert on applicant selection methods, is part of a panel looking at “patrol officer psychological screening dimensions” for the state of California. Working to help police agencies “screen in” the best applicants, the panel has identified ten “dimensions” essential to professional police work:

  •Social competence

  •Teamwork

  •Adaptability/flexibility

  •Conscientiousness/dependability

  •Impulse control/attention to safety

  •Integrity/ethics

  •Emotional regulation and stress tolerance

  •Decision making and judgment

  •Assertiveness/persuasiveness

  •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 . . .”