Career Visions Attract Crowd of 5,000 as LAPD Holds Its First Job Expo

Nancy Wong has wanted to be a police officer ever since 1979, when a high school classmate high on drugs was decapitated in a car accident.

“It wasn’t a pretty sight,” said Wong, 24, a student at East Los Angeles College and a native of Hong Kong. “There are too many crimes in the world. And too many drugs everywhere.”

Honore Aubert, 20, said his real ambition is to become a professional bounty hunter, but allowed that “you’ve got to be a cop first” to do that.

“I want to do something with danger,” said the Diamond Bar security guard enthusiastically. “Something having to do with guns and bullets.”

Statistically, neither is likely to make it into the Los Angeles Police Department.

They were in the crowd--estimated by the department at 5,000--who attended the LAPD’s first-ever career expo held Saturday at the city’s Police Academy. They were also among the more than 1,500 who actually applied for 142 openings in the 7,100-officer department.

“I’m overwhelmed by this response,” said Mayor Tom Bradley, a former police officer himself, as he strolled through the crowd looking at an array of exhibits, which included a robotic bomb retriever armed with a shotgun and a miniature police car that plays Disney tunes and talks to children.

Police officials held the job fair, patterned after a similar one in Oakland, to help fill new openings created by a budget increase approved last year. In addition, said Deputy Chief William Rathburn, the department hopes to get its recruitment program back into shape after a nine-month hiring freeze which ended last summer.

The department also wants to improve the quality of its personnel by increasing the applicant pool, especially among minorities and women, who were well represented Saturday.

“There might be some apprehensions in the minority community,” Rathburn said. “This is an opportunity to come and talk face to face with a police officer, which might help overcome some of those apprehensions.”

But standing in line for 30 minutes to fill out an application was just the beginning of a long process, said Jurutha Brown, chief of the city’s police and fire selection division. The next step, she said, is a written exam to be administered Feb. 7 to the first 750 applicants and sometime thereafter to the rest. The tests will be followed by interviews, physical checkups, psychological evaluations and background checks.

Traditionally, she said, only about 4% of those who apply make it into the Police Academy for the six-month training program leading to full-time employment. Many of those who do not, she said, are eliminated simply because they lose interest sometime during the extended screening process, which can last as long as six months.

“One thing we are trying to encourage today,” Brown said, “is for people to stick with it.” For those who do, she said, the reward is beginning salaries ranging from $29,000 to $32,500 a year, and opportunities galore.

To demonstrate that point, officers were on hand Saturday to talk about specialties ranging from policing the beach to patrolling on horseback and to show off equipment including helicopters and motorcycles.

One of the most popular exhibits was the SWAT Team van, where an enthusiastic crowd examined a display of flack jackets and automatic weapons, while Officer Andy Simon provided them with nitty-gritty information on being a cop. “The fact is that there’s lots of crime and not enough policemen,” he said. “You can take away somebody’s freedom--there’s no other job where you can do that. It’s an ugly thing.”

To avoid the kind of stress that causes high divorce rates among police personnel, Simon said, police officers should “take their badges off” when they get home. “You have to keep your job in perspective,” he said. “You get that little bit of power and it’s overwhelming to some people--they can’t handle it.”

Most of the would-be recruits didn’t seem too worried about that, however.

Lee Ruffyn, 22, who earns a living by selling cosmetics in Sun Valley, said she has wanted to be a police officer all her life. “You see something on TV and it affects you, but if you’re not out there you don’t have a say,” she explained.