Gates, Block Oppose U.S. Plan for ROTC-Like ‘Police Corps’

Los Angeles County’s two top law enforcement officials have come out against a national plan to establish a “police corps” of college students who would receive scholarships in exchange for commitments to spend at least four years in police jobs.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and Sheriff Sherman Block voted against the plan which was narrowly endorsed at a recent meeting of the heads of the nations’s largest law enforcement agencies in Louisville.

The group--which calls itself Major Police Chiefs--voted 12-11 to support the “police corps” bill introduced in Congress last summer. The corps has been promoted as a way to solve police manpower shortages across the country.

But Gates, the group’s chairman, complained Wednesday that the measure would “set up kind of an elite corps” who “would be resented” by current officers. He said the money should be set aside instead for further education of established police officers.

Block used even stronger language to criticize the plan, calling potential participants “mercenaries, for lack of a better term. People who are going into law enforcement for a short time because it would benefit them.”

He predicted that participants would “be counting the days” until they could leave police work.

“I really question the level of commitment these people would have,” Block said. “Would they be willing to roll around in the dirt like the job requires?”

The plan would enroll 25,000 future officers in college each year. Modeled after the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), the federal government would pay up to $10,000 a year in college expenses for each participant.

To make sure students do not renege on their four-year commitments, the plan calls for the government to pay the funds only after the work has been completed. While they are in school, the students would have to obtain loans to finance their educations.

The bill would create an Office of the Police Corps within the Department of Justice, with a director appointed by the President. The annual cost has been estimated at $50 million for fiscal 1990, rising to $490 million in 1993.

The corps’ supporters range from Rep. Robert K. Dornan, the conservative Republican from Garden Grove, to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the most liberal members of Congress.

“This is certainly not an ideological issue,” Dornan has said. “This is a survival issue.”

A crime study group headed by New York lawyer Adam Walinsky, a former aide to the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, developed the idea for a police corps in 1982.

San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara, who supports the proposal, once called it “one of the real innovative ideas to come along in the last 10 years.”

Another long-term supporter, Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), has proposed state legislation that would help create a police corps in California.

He said Wednesday that he had talked to Gates and Block.

“I think it rankles their idea of law enforcement,” he said. “I just think (they are) worried about having an echelon of people who might not be staying for the long haul. I think you’d get some to stay and some would move on. But it’s a hazardous obligation. I don’t think it’s something a student would take on lightly. It’s not like a three-year vacation.”

Hayden said that when he asks local police officials “about where are they going to get more cops, I don’t get a good answer.”

The Los Angeles Police Department is recruiting 900 new officers to reach an authorized force of 8,400 by July.

In trying to make his case against the plan to generally conservative police chiefs, Gates said he “just pointed out that this issue was raised in California by Tom Hayden. And I reminded them who Tom Hayden was--a friend of Jane Fonda.”

Hayden, however, predicted that even critics such as Gates and Block will go along if it is adopted.

“I can’t imagine a sheriff or chief of police turning down new personnel,” he said. “I think they’ll hem and haw a little bit then see how it works and put in an application.”