Police Panel Ponders Departmental Changes : Law enforcement: Random drug testing of officers, closer scrutiny of new hires are being considered.

A San Diego Police Department ethics board may recommend department-wide random drug testing, a special anti-corruption unit to deal with potential abuses among officers, and more extensive scrutiny of new hires, an ethics committee member said Wednesday.

At the same time, the department’s second-in-command is conducting a police management audit that is designed to test whether the department’s policies are being carried out and whether its organizational structure is sound.

The ethics review, considered the most extensive in department history, began in February when top administrators decided that police officers were not getting any ethics training once they graduated from the Police Academy.

Lt. Dennis Gibson, a member of the 20-person committee, told a citizen’s advisory board that studies police issues that his group is expecting to forward a number of recommendations to Police Chief Bob Burgreen in the next four or five months.

One of those recommendations may include mandatory random drug testing for all employees, he said.

The department put a program into place last month to test about 150 officers who work in highly sensitive units, such as internal affairs, narcotics, criminal intelligence, gangs and vice. Gibson said 26 tests have been performed so far, and nobody has tested positive for drugs.

San Diego and South Lake Tahoe are the only departments to impose such mandatory tests, which the president of the state’s largest law-enforcement association--the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California--opposes.

Now the committee is considering whether to randomly test all 1,850 police officers. It would cost the department about $220,000 a year to test each employee twice, he said.

In addition, the department may establish a special corruption unit whose investigators would handle sensitive police misconduct cases, Gibson said. Such investigations now are handled by the police internal affairs division.

Gibson said few departments in the country have corruption units and the San Diego Police Department is wary of establishing one because of the public perception that to create one is to admit that corruption exists.

Senior officers, from Burgreen on down, say their department is now corruption-free despite allegations that police officers may have had improper contact with prostitutes in the mid-1980s.

Burgreen recently suggested that the ethics committee establish guidelines that discourage officers from getting personally involved with prostitutes after allegations surfaced that at least five police officers and one former officer may have had such improper involvement.

A special unit of the Metropolitan Homicide Task Force--the group of investigators examining the deaths of 43 women, mostly prostitutes and transients, since 1985--is looking at allegations that police officers may have had relationships with one of the murdered women and another prostitute who has been missing for four years.

Some members of the department believe that not enough is being done to test for possible corruption, such as carefully auditing money in narcotics cases or inspecting crime scenes to see if officers follow proper procedures.

Gibson said that if the committee does not recommend creation of a special corruption unit, it may advise Burgreen to expand the internal affairs staff.

It may also recommend that greater scrutiny be placed on new hires, including the expansion of screening committees that decide who gets hired and asking personnel administrators to personally visit recruits’ job references.

“The committee feels strongly that if we are concerned about honesty, integrity and credibility of police officers, we need to start at the ground floor and ensure to the extent possible that we attract only the most qualified and ethical people that we can,” Gibson said.

The committee also is considering whether to rotate officers out of specialized assignments such as narcotics enforcement, criminal intelligence, vice and gangs to keep the units corruption-free.

Gibson said San Diego police are not alone in their lack of ethics training programs.

“A national survey we did indicated we’re not different from a lot of departments,” he said. “There’s just not much being done in the area of ethics awareness or training.”

Meanwhile, Assistant Chief Norm Stamper said he has been assigned to study the department’s organizational structure.

Burgreen had assigned Stamper to personally review the prostitute murder cases.

Stamper recommended that the task force membership be nearly doubled and divided into three areas: one team to examine all the murder victims; another to scrutinize possible police misconduct, and the third to investigate the death of prostitute Donna Gentile, who was murdered in 1985 shortly after she testified against two police officers.

Stamper said Wednesday his work with the task force has been completed.

He said Burgreen is concerned that police policies are not being carried out because there are seven levels of management between the police chief and the patrol officers.

Because of such a long chain of command, Stamper said, Burgreen’s messages about what he wants done in the department may not be filtering down.

“My first job is an audit of the organization,” he said. “What is the extent to which the chief’s philosophies and policies are translated into practice? The second part of the assignment is: Are we organized effectively to get police work done?”

Stamper said he will also be sitting in on ethics committee meetings and on those of a separate police group looking at the department’s use of deadly force.

“I can tell you that the chief would like to see a much stronger community orientation,” Stamper said. “The bywords of his administration are dignity and respect. He wants citizens treated with dignity and respect and wants to communicate that message to the officers.”