Point Reyes Light - August 3, 2000
Cops can get hired despite past drug use
As a growing US population demands safer streets and neighborhoods, law enforcement agencies are faced with a dilemma that seems to get worse as each decade passes: How does a police force expand its staff of officers from a shrinking field of recruits with untarnished resumes and drug-free histories?
The demand for new law enforcement officers in recent years is unprecedented. As of June 1997, sheriff's departments nationwide had an estimated 175,000 fulltime law officers, while local police departments employed approximately 420,000 sworn personnel, reports the US Department of Justice. From 1993 to 1997, sheriff's department personnel grew by 4.4 percent per year, while the number of city police grew by 3 percent annually.
Officials responsible for hiring are finding fewer and fewer prospects with drug-free records, and many agencies have had to liberalize hiring policies. As a result, a growing percentage of the nation's law officers have been hired despite admitting to past drug use - and even drug dealing.
Six months clean Lt. John Brunslik, commander of the West Marin Sheriff's Substation, this week said that during his tenure as a hiring sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department 15 years ago, recruits were eligible for employment as long as they had not smoked pot within six months of applying. "All of the candidates had some kind of use in their background," Lt. Brunslik said.
Records leaked to the press earlier this year indicated that a new Denver policeman had admitted during a hiring interview that on more than 150 occasions he had used drugs, including crack cocaine, speed, LSD, PCP, and mescaline. Civil service records revealed that 84 percent of Denver police applicants and 65 percent of those hired have acknowledged past drug experimentation, mostly with marijuana.
Research later revealed that police departments across the nation now are willing to hire officers who have smoked marijuana up to 75 times (as in Dallas) or have used hallucinogens up to 10 years earlier (as in Seattle). In what must be one of the more tolerant policies, the Seattle Police Department will even hire officers who have dealt marijuana, as long as they haven't done so in the last 10 years and as long as they were never were arrested.
Marin can't hire drug dealers The Marin County Sheriff's Department - whose force is smaller and better funded than most of its big-city counterparts - has more stringent standards for hiring officers. County policy states that applicants "shall be rejected if they have, during the past three years, used any marijuana or marijuana derivative" or "if they have, during the past five years, without a doctor's prescription, used cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamines, barbiturates, peyote, or any controlled substance."
In addition, the Marin policy prohibits hiring applicants who have ever sold or manufactured any controlled substance or who have injected a controlled substance without a doctor's prescription.
Double-standard With an estimated 70 million Americans having tried marijuana at least once, law enforcement recruits who have not ever used the drug are increasingly out of mainstream society, especially as the younger generations become the older ones. In an age in which not only police, but also politicians, judges, and other public officials are admitting past drug-use, some experts believe that the continued prosecution of pot smokers by law-enforcement agencies amounts to a ridiculous double-standard.
"The way this country looks at it, you're a criminal only if you get caught," Joseph McNamara, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and former police chief of San Jose and Kansas City, Missouri, told The Los Angeles Times. "It's such an incredible hypocrisy."