Breaking Rank (33 page)

“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:

       
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Social competence