Sheriff’s Minority Recruits Put on Hold : Employment: The county department is committed to improving its ethnic mix. But it is hindered by budget restrictions that limit recruitment.

Every month for the past year, Frank Seneris of Oxnard has called Ventura County Sheriff’s Lt. Dante Honorico, asking the same question and getting the same answer:

“Hang in there.”

The response translates into another discouraging month for Seneris in his quest to become a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy.

Donald Rodarte of Oxnard is as exasperated for the same reason.

Rodarte patrols the Ojai area once a week as a Ventura County sheriff’s reserve deputy, packing a weapon and performing the same job as a full-time deputy. But there is a big difference: He does not get paid.

As is the case with Seneris, the Sheriff’s Department has no money to hire him.

“I’ve got to be honest with you,” Rodarte said recently. “It’s been pretty frustrating.”

Seneris, 46, a Philippines native who is a security guard at Point Mugu, and Rodarte, 22, a Latino who grew up near Ojai and who works for an armored transport firm, are among a handful of minorities recruited under a special sheriff’s program.

But they’re not getting onto the force.

The problem is the same one facing state and local governments everywhere--everybody’s squeezed for cash, including the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

As a result, it has been a year since the last class of recruits graduated from the Ventura County Criminal Justice Center in Camarillo, where would-be deputies are put through 21 weeks of basic training.

“It’s the longest we’ve gone without graduating a class,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Craig Husband, who supervises the center.

Seneris, Rodarte and the handful of other minority candidates completed their paperwork and physicals as long as two years ago.

How long they will continue to “hang in there” before moving out of the area or joining other police agencies is a matter of conjecture.

“I’ll wait six to eight months and then I’ll start testing for other (police) departments,” said Rodarte, who is married and works as a driver and guard for Armored Transport of California in Ventura.

“I’ve heard of eight tentative dates” when a new sheriff’s class might begin its training, he said. But the rumors were unfounded.

The money woes come at a time when Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter is committed to expanding minority recruitment to better reflect the county’s ethnic mix. He is aware, for example, that only about 10% of his approximately 600 sworn personnel are Latino in a county where Latinos constitute about 27% of the population.

In comparison, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has almost 7,900 sworn personnel, has a 22% Latino work force in a county where about 38% of the population is Latino.

Last year, Ventura County supervisors cut about 4% from Carpenter’s $68-million budget, and county officials have directed him to draft a new budget reflecting a 15% cut by July.

Carpenter, who became sheriff in January, said he is “used to being a cheerleader” for his agency but that he has to be honest with people who are anxious to become deputies.

“The general hiring outlook is frustrated at best,” Carpenter said.

“Any effort that we can make toward increasing the diversity in our work force has become very frustrating because we can’t reach out and hire people. We don’t see an academy in the immediate future.”

The head of the deputies union does not interpret such views as rhetoric hiding another agenda.

“I’m encouraged by the commitment the sheriff has made to actively go out and recruit all minorities,” said Deputy David Williams, president of the Ventura County Deputy Sheriff’s Assn.

“We’re in a situation where we need minorities and now we’re talking about laying people off, so it’s a frustrating situation.”

Cmdr. Richard Rodriguez, who oversees hiring for the Sheriff’s Department, said the two dozen people designated for the academy two years ago “were completely processed in every sense of the word.”

Included were tests and physicals, which add up to a price tag of about $3,000 per individual, according to Sheriff’s Department estimates.

“Now we’ll have to start over again at a time when we’re trying to save money,” Rodriguez said.

Seneris, who is married and has lived in Oxnard for 15 years, has been working for the government as a civilian police officer at the Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station since June, 1991.

His credentials include duty in the late 1960s as an infantry corporal in Vietnam, where he earned a Purple Heart.

Seneris took a step toward realizing his ambition of becoming a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in 1972.

“I went halfway through the academy and then had to drop out for financial reasons,” he said.

Since then, he has held jobs as an auto mechanic and owned an auto repair shop for a time in Port Hueneme.

He began job hunting in law-enforcement circles again several years ago, and tested for the Hawthorne Police Department and the Rapid Transit District police, who patrol the county’s transit systems.

Unfortunately for Seneris, the same woman administered the psychological tests for both agencies. She flunked him twice.

“She said I acted too macho,” he said. “I still resent that.”

Ventura County Sheriff’s Lt. Honorico is a native of the Philippines who met Seneris in Oxnard’s Philippine-American community, where they both live. He is a supervising detective in the sheriff’s east county office and for two years has headed the agency’s minority relations committee.

Honorico said he did not blink when he heard about Seneris’ bad experience with the psychologist. He recalled that when he joined the agency in 1976, there were no such tests.

“If I had to take it today, I probably wouldn’t pass it,” Honorico said. “There are cultural differences and I have a lot of cultural baggage” which, he declared, a psychologist not in tune with his background might misinterpret.

Seneris has not wavered on his goal of becoming a sheriff’s deputy, a position with a beginning salary of $31,200 annually.

For his part, Rodarte, a Ventura High School graduate, said he has wanted to work for a law enforcement agency since he was a child watching police shows on television.

“I’ll work for a sheriff’s department wherever I can get my foot in the door,” he said.

Few things irk Rodarte more than a deputy grousing about the job. To such complaints, he said he has a standard response: “Let’s switch.”

Hiring in the Sheriff’s Department

Category Number Percent Male 528 88.0% Female 72 12.0% Caucasian 513 85.5% Latino 61 10.2% African-American 14 2.3% Asian 11 1.8% American Indian 1 0.2%

Source: Sheriff’s Department personnel statistics, June, 1992.