LAPD, Union Reach Accord on Drug Tests

Agreement on a sweeping program of mandatory random drug testing for all Los Angeles police officers was announced Thursday, ending a long-simmering dispute that pitted Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Daryl F. Gates against the city’s powerful police union.

In return for dropping its opposition to the plan, the Police Protective League won an extra day of vacation a year for about 1,500 officers with 21 or more years of service and two extra days for about 300 with at least 26 years on the force.

League President George Aliano said Thursday that he believes members will ratify the plan when it is put before them in early January.

“It’s unfortunate we have to go through a test of innocence,” Aliano said, “but if that makes the public feel more confident, and my officers want to do that, then that’s what we’re going to do.”

The drug testing, expected to begin in January, would affect about 7,400 sworn officers with the rank of lieutenant or below. Every officer would be tested once a year, without prior notice, through urine samples. Also, a computer will be used to randomly select 30% of the force for an additional testing.

High-ranking Police Department management, such as captains and above, already have agreed to a mandatory drug-testing policy. New recruits and probationary officers also have been subject to drug testing for some time.

“I think it’s a sad situation we’ve come to where we have to really invade the privacy of our police officers in order to do this testing,” Gates said Thursday at a press conference with Bradley and Aliano. “But at this point,” Gates added, “I think it’s very, very important that we tell the public with a degree of certainty that the Los Angeles Police Department is drug-free.”

Gates said officers he has spoken with approve of the plan because they “don’t want partners that use drugs.”

The agreement makes Los Angeles part of a recent trend among big-city police departments, according to Ray Hamilton, a spokesman for the Police Foundation, a law enforcement research organization based in Washington. Boston, New York, Miami and Honolulu already have implemented police drug-testing plans, he said.

“There’s a fair amount of controversy each time, and each time, the union had some resistance to it,” Hamilton said. “But I would think it’s probably a good thing, particularly for people in sensitive areas such as narcotics enforcement.”

In September, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved mandatory drug testing for all 8,000 sworn peace officers in the Sheriff’s Department. Officers are tested three to six times a year, depending on their assignments. Narcotics officers, for instance, will be tested as often as four times a year.

The Los Angeles agreement was something of victory for the PPL, which filed a complaint of unfair labor practices in February in an attempt to block the plan. The league argued that officials had no right to insist on drug testing because such a demand would change the conditions of the police contract with the city in midterm. In exchange for dropping the complaint, the league demanded concessions.

Last June, Bradley scuttled as “outrageously excessive” a PPL-backed plan to sweeten the deal with five extra weeks of vacation for 50 senior officers. Under that proposal, the city would have given a total of 1,250 vacation days.

The plan announced Thursday would cost the city about 2,000 vacation days, or the equivalent of nine police officers a year.

Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani said Thursday that Bradley approved of the new plan, despite its higher cost, because it spreads a relatively minor benefit over a large number of officers.

“The original plan would have given a very small number of officers an exorbitant amount of vacation and that was the mayor’s primary objection,” Fabiani said.

Gates, who has publicly taken a harsh stance on even occasional drug use, said Thursday that he does not believe there is a drug problem among Los Angeles Police Department officers. Whenever an officer is caught using drugs, he or she is fired, Gates said.

“If we ever get rid of this plague of drug abuse in this country,” Gates added, “I will be the first one to say that we should eliminate random drug testing for police officers.”

Gates cited one case, however, in which an officer went out in a black and white car in full uniform and seemed to disappear. “We lost him. He went off the air. We finally found him asleep in his car under the influence of cocaine.”

City Councilwoman Joy Picus, who chairs the Human Resources and Labor Relations Committee, said Thursday that she supports the settlement but does not believe that random testing will extend beyond the Police Department.

The council, which voted in executive session to approve the settlement, felt that the added vacation days were justified as an incentive to keep longtime officers on the force. “I thought that the Police Protective League compromised a great deal,” Picus said.

Several rank-and-file officers said Thursday that they have no reservations about the program and added that they expect the union membership to overwhelmingly approve the procedure.

“We don’t want a bunch of boozers or pillheads, so I say go ahead and do it,” said Officer David Herrick, assigned to the Devonshire station.

He said the public should be satisfied that their police officers are drug-free.

“We’re gun-carriers,” he said. “We’re also the only profession probably in the world where employees take a sanity, psychological test before we’re hired. We’re in a whole different ballgame.”

Detective Bill Delong said the drug-testing requirement was inevitable, brought on by increased drug use in society. But he said he doubted that the tests would show that a significant number of officers use illegal drugs. “I have nothing to hide,” he said.

A source close to the union leadership said the league surveyed its membership last year and learned that rank-and-file officers did not want to go along with mandatory drug testing. He said the survey also showed that if drug testing was a foregone conclusion, the union should negotiate some benefits before conceding.

He said the problem for the league was that members felt backed into a corner.

“It’s a hot political issue,” he said. “If the league continued to fight drug testing, they were afraid they’d be portrayed as soft on drugs. And it’s an issue where Gates would be able to show the union as scumbags.”

Officer George Law, a spokesman for the Miami Police Department, said his agency began drug testing five years ago. “No one liked it at first,” he said. “They all screamed invasion of privacy.” But today, he said, the program is widely accepted.

In Boston, the officers’ union sued to prevent implementation of mandatory drug testing on the grounds that it is an “unreasonable search and seizure.” The program has been tied up in the courts for about five years.