Psychologist Under Added Scrutiny : Workplace: Police officials have joined the review of Michael R. Mantell’s work interviewing potential employees. The county is also examining how well the psychologist has done his job.

For the first time in 10 years, San Diego police officials are reviewing the numerous law enforcement contracts held by Michael R. Mantell to determine whether the nationally recognized police psychologist is working the number of hours required by his city contract.

Police and city officials want to know how Mantell could have worked the 2,104 hours--more than 40 hours a week--that he claimed for the San Diego Police Department during fiscal 1988-89, while also holding contracts with the county and several small city law enforcement agencies to interview police officer candidates and counsel troubled officers.

The city review is the second government inquiry now under way into Mantell’s professional activities. The county Civil Service Commission is also investigating Mantell, to determine whether he adequately tested candidates.

The city review comes at a time when Mantell’s $235,000 annual city contract is up for bid for the first time since he was hired a decade ago.

Assistant City Manager Jack McGrory said he called for the review after learning of the extent of Mantell’s obligations to the county and other law enforcement agencies.

Mantell met Tuesday morning with Police Chief Bob Burgreen to discuss the number of hours the psychologist has been working for the city and other area law enforcement agencies, McGrory said. He said police officials are collecting copies of all of Mantell’s contracts.

The central question for city officials is whether the San Diego Police Department, Mantell’s largest contract agency, is being shortchanged in the number of hours the psychologist is required to work.

“There are only a certain number of hours you can humanly work in a year,” McGrory said. “I want to make sure there isn’t a conflict between the requirements that we levied and the requirements of the other contracts.”

However, McGrory said, “there has been absolutely no allegations of fraud or abuse at this point in time.”

Mantell, in an interview Tuesday night, defended his ability to meet the city contract and predicted that the city review will show that his work hour claims are justified.

“They’ll check the hours and they’ll find that everything’s fine,” he said.

He said that in the 1988 calendar year, he worked about 54 hours a week on his city and other government contracts. Last year, he said, he worked about 52 hours a week performing those duties.

“I’ll tell you, we’ve never had any significant complaints,” he said in a separate interview last week. “No one has ever come to us and said, ‘The quality of your work is lacking, or the numbers of your work is lacking.’

“No one’s ever come to us with anything that would be negative, from the city or the Police Department.”

However, several smaller city police departments in San Diego County have in recent years stopped using Mantell’s services, some of them because of problems in scheduling counseling and evaluation sessions with Mantell.

San Diego officials began their review this week after becoming concerned that Mantell’s new county contract and obligations to smaller cities take too much of his time away from his work for the Police Department. The county Civil Service Commission wants to know whether Mantell adequately tested candidates for positions of deputy sheriff, probation officer and marshal.

He is required by the county to spend at least 30 minutes interviewing 70% to 80% of the estimated 700 job applicants, plus read test scores and write evaluation reports. At the same time, Mantell is contractually obligated this year to work 1,850 hours for the city.

Mantell also conducts psychological evaluations for the police departments in Escondido and El Cajon, the San Diego Community College District and the San Diego Unified School District, according to a survey by The Times.

He also counsels El Centro police officers, has worked with the U. S. Customs Service and has screened applicants for lifeguard posts.

In addition, Mantell is a frequent guest on radio talk shows, writes five newspaper columns a month, and has been called on occasion to counsel officers and emergency personnel in other parts of the country.

The El Cajon Police Department expects Mantell to screen 100 officers at $200 apiece in fiscal 1989-90, the fifth consecutive year he has maintained a contract with that city, said Terri Lunine, the city’s director of personnel.

In Escondido, Mantell has screened 144 applicants for the police force since 1985, at prices ranging from $155 each in 1985 to $200 this year, said Jane Paradowski, the city’s human resources director.

Since May, 1987, Mantell has done 39 pre-employment screenings for the San Diego Community College District--current price: $190 apiece--and approximately 5 or 6 in the past calendar year for the city school district at $200 apiece, according to spokeswoman Norma Trost. Mantell’s contract with the city schools dates back to 1987, she said.

Some police agencies have dropped Mantell’s services in recent years.

“It seemed to us that he was so busy that it was difficult for us to get people in to see him,” said Police Chief Jerry Boyd of Coronado. “His scheduling was too tight, and when we had a couple of job vacancies, we just couldn’t wait.”

Mantell did not quarrel with Boyd’s complaint. “That’s true, that’s very accurate,” he said. “I think if I can’t do a service for someone, I can’t do it. If I’m busy, I’m busy.”

Bill Winters, police chief in Chula Vista, said his department stopped using Mantell after the psychologist wanted to retest Chula Vista job applicants whom Mantell had earlier rejected for jobs with the San Diego Police Department.

He said Chula Vista did not want taxpayers to have to pay to evaluate the same people twice. “I guess you could say we switched from him because we didn’t like the idea of being double-billed in a way,” Winters said.

But Mantell said that sometimes those evaluations were as long as six months apart, and that San Diego and Chula Vista have “different standards and different criteria.”

“The data the chief would have been using would have been old data,” Mantell said. “And it’s not safe for the citizens to use old data and make a decision on the basis of that for another department.”

Police Chief Bob Soto of La Mesa, which also once used Mantell, said there was “some dissatisfaction” with the way the psychologist graded job applicants.

“There were too many No. 3s,” Soto said. “We would ask Mr. Mantell to grade applicants on a measure of from 1 to 5, and he too often came back with grades of No. 3. In other words, he threw it back to us to make the decisions on these people, and we wanted someone who, with professional expertise, could tell us whether we were hiring the right people or not.”

Added to that problem, Soto said, was this dilemma: “We didn’t know for sure how much time Mr. Mantell was spending on the work, and whether or not it was him or his associates” who were doing the pre-employment screenings.

Mantell said that Soto was “absolutely correct” that the 1-to-5 grading system was used in La Mesa. But he said he no longer uses the system because it is too vague. “We stopped using it a long time ago,” he said.

According to Leroy Brady, head of the San Diego Police Department’s personnel unit, the department had never received a complaint about Mantell’s performance. Because there were no complaints, he said, the Police Department never audited or independently monitored Mantell’s work.

“You have a psychological service here, and it’s based on a great deal of trust because of the area the contractor is working in,” Brady said. “We trusted the hours he said he’s providing, and we had no reason to doubt that.”

County officials recently wrote a new contract with tougher monitoring provisions of Mantell’s work after complaints surfaced about his evaluations. One county official said it could be difficult for Mantell to maintain both the city and county contracts at the same level of performance.

“It’s going to be very tough for him to meet the stringent requirements that we have without changing some of what he’s doing for the city,” said Ethel Chastain, director of the county’s Department of Human Resources.

“I had no idea of the volume or the hours that he spent with the city. That will be up to the city to monitor. But if what you tell me is true and it would continue, obviously he’s either going to have to add some staff in order to do both or amend his contractual agreement with the city.”

Mantell is one of 20 psychological service providers who bid on the new city contract, which goes into effect with the new fiscal year, July 1.

“When we were told it was being put out for bid we were not happy campers,” Mantell said. “We knew there was a possibility they would not be continuing with us.”

Mantell said he beat out 60 bidders in 1980 to first win the contract with the San Diego Police Department. Every year since then, he has simply resubmitted a work proposal and, after some negotiation over compensation, his contract has always been renewed.