Understaffed Compton Police Lose in Recruitment Race

The audience would not surrender.

Those at the recent community meeting had a recurring question for Police Cmdr. Tom Armstrong: Why doesn’t the Compton Police Department have more officers?

Since last summer, Armstrong said, the department has been trying to recruit 18 new officers. But despite its best efforts, only five have been hired. He spoke of how Compton has to compete with law enforcement giants such as the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for the few qualified candidates who are available.

But the debate only got louder.

One woman insisted that if the department has not been able to fill its openings, it is because it has not been recruiting hard enough.

The commander, seemingly exasperated, measured his words: “Lady, would you want your son or husband to be a Compton police officer?”

The argument ended.

Faced with one of the county’s highest murder rates, ever increasing problems with drugs and gangs, and numerous citizen complaints about slow response time, the Compton City Council agreed last July to expand its police force from 120 officers to 138.

The department now has 125 officers and it does not appear that it will be fully staffed in the near future, administrators say.

Cmdr. Anthony Ruiz, who oversees Compton’s recruiting efforts, said his department is hampered because there are more local job openings for police officers than there are qualified candidates.

The Sheriff’s Department is attempting to hire 700 officers this year and the Los Angeles Police Department wants to expand its force by 200 before July. Each agency said it goes through about 40 potential recruits for each officer who is hired.

50 Openings a Year

Personnel Director Sally Taylor said Compton has received 460 applications for the police force since July. Taylor said her department has publicized the openings by running job notices in law enforcement journals and sending representatives to local colleges.

In neighboring Long Beach, 50 recruits are hired annually. To achieve that quota the city assigns six officers to six-week stints as full-time recruiters. That effort brings in about 1,500 of the 2,500 applications the department receives, officials said, with most of the rest coming through advertisements on radio and in local publications.

“These are used especially to reach women and minority applicants,” said Mario Beas, Long Beach’s Civil Service recruitment officer.

Compton City Manager James C. Goins said that if this year’s expansion goal is not reached, he will propose sending a recruiter to Southern black colleges such as Grambling State University in Louisiana.

“It looks like we might have to go on a national recruitment drive, because we have tried locally,” Goins said.

Although Compton, Long Beach, Los Angeles and the Sheriff’s Department all pay new officers about $30,000 a year, Ruiz asserted that applicants are more apt to go where the pace is easier than it is in Compton. He said the slowest shift in Compton is probably comparable to the busiest in those other agencies.

Indeed, according to the most recent survey conducted by the state attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Statistics, Compton has about 1.3 sworn officers for every 1,000 residents--slightly below the statewide average of 1.9 officers. At the same time, the city reported crime figures to the FBI that--when broken down on a per-officer basis--indicate that the workload of Compton police is twice the state average and higher than in any other Southeast / Long Beach area city, including Los Angeles.

“When you start your shift (in Compton) you know you are going to be working all night,” Ruiz said. “These guys might go out with 15 calls pending, two of which are shootings. It doesn’t take much before an officer would reach a point of saturation, so we need people with a good work ethic. . . . Because around here, we have some good crooks.”

But those who are too anxious to see some action are eliminated quickly, Ruiz said. After losing a large majority of its applicants for failing either the department’s physical or intelligence standards, half of those left are eliminated for personality reasons, usually over-aggressiveness.

Stuart Schaffer, a psychologist who does testing for several law enforcement agencies, said Compton’s mental health exam is among the area’s toughest.

Public Service Emphasis

“What we look for with Compton is an applicant with a strong public service orientation,” Schaffer said, “somebody who sees the job as something that benefits the community and is not out to only benefit himself. We also look for somebody, and this is different (from most applicants), who can exercise a high degree of independent judgment who can also follow orders willingly when that is necessary.”

Ruiz said it is increasingly difficult to find officers capable of handling the mounds of paper work involved in law enforcement.

“A kid might have all of the ambition in the world, be a hard charger, but he can’t make it because he can’t read or write,” Ruiz said, adding that this is being encountered by all police agencies. “And some of the applicants have college degrees.”

One of Compton’s new officers said he was told about the amount of clerical work, but it is even worse than he imagined.

“We have to write everything we do,” Jerry Patterson said. Patterson joined the force last October, after having worked as a police dispatch operator, first for Compton and then the Sheriff’s Department.

“I had been doing that (dispatching) for about two years when I decided, ‘I can do that,’ ” Patterson said about his decision to become a police officer.

A muscular man of 30, Patterson said he joined Compton’s department because he is a native of the city and felt it would be gratifying to work there.

“And to be honest, it was also the economics,” Patterson said. “It pays well . . . and it’s stable. What are they going to do, lay you off because there is no crime?”

COMPARISON OF POLICE WORKLOADS

Per 1,000 Cases Per City Officers Residents *Officer Compton 125 1.3 70.6 Downey 107 1.2 42.0 Long Beach 659 1.6 52.4 Los Angeles 6,951 2.0 45.5 Montebello 74 1.2 47.1 Signal Hill 28 3.4 34.4 South Gate 91 1.1 48.0 Whittier 85 1.1 38.8 Statewide 53,606 1.9 34.4

* Major crimes divided by number of officers

Source: Sworn officers listed by the state Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Statistics; population figures listed by the Department of Finance; crime rates figured per 1,000 residents from FBI index reports. Does not include cities served by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.