In the past, the criteria for applying for a job as a police officer has been strict, but those stiff regulations are keeping qualified applicants from filling needed jobs.
That is apparent in Pine Bluff where the Police Department has a multitude of openings, but many applicants are getting disqualified because of mistakes they may have made years ago. We support the department in taking another look at those criteria to make sure they are necessary benchmarks for applicants.
Certainly, there are things in a person’s past that, without a doubt, should keep them out of a police uniform. Such problems as felony convictions, serious misdemeanors, current drug use and domestic violence are some of them.
But as Police Chief Kelvin Sergeant said, perhaps it’s time to dust off some of the other regulations.
“What we may need to do is relook at some of those disqualifications as it relates to certain Class A misdemeanors,” he said.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
One of the areas where police departments are losing candidates is with marijuana use. The Pine Bluff department’s stand is that an applicant can’t have used pot the past three years, although Sergeant said he would like to change that to two years. Other, more serious drug use problems, such as cocaine or LSD, are non-negotiable disqualifiers.
The question, he said, is not so much whether a person has ever done drugs but rather how extensive that drug use was.
“Are we talking about once or twice within that time period or are we talking about daily usage?” he said. “My concern would be putting someone in a position that may have a drug problem and giving them a gun.”
This, of course, is not just a Pine Bluff problem, and other cities have changed course in the way they try to attract people to jobs in their police departments.
An Associated Press story said that police departments are changing the way they test candidates because such yardsticks have “shown to disproportionately disqualify minority candidates.”
“People from minority communities are more likely to be disqualified by criminal background and credit checks, because members of those communities are more likely to have contact with the criminal justice system and have lower credit scores,” the AP story said, pulling information from a report by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
As well, “minorities also may have more trouble on written tests that don’t accurately screen people for the skills needed for police jobs,” the story went on to say.
“I don’t want to hire altar boys to be police officers, necessarily,” Police Commissioner Kevin Davis told The Baltimore Sun, according to the AP story. “I want people of good character, of good moral character, but I want people who have lived a life just like everybody else — a life not unlike the lives of the people who they are going to be interacting with every day.”
In Kentucky, one city required 60 college credit hours from applicants, but when its labor supply dried up, the city set that requirement aside. The effect was immediate, with so many applications coming in that the city had to stop taking them, the AP story said.
The point is that there are good people out there who likely would make good police officers, except for that little run-in they had with the law when they were 19, etc., etc. Let’s take a closer look at those infractions and make sure they are the kinds of things that should forever keep someone from applying for a police job. If we are leaving otherwise-qualified candidates out of the mix because, well, we’ve always done it that way, that’s just not a good enough reason, and really, it never was.