Sheriff’s Department Looks for Chosen Few : Law enforcement: Bumper crop of 1,229 applicants is tested physically, mentally, ethically for just 25 vacancies.

Dissecting word puzzles and vaulting six-foot fences, 1,229 would-be cops began competing this weekend for 25 coveted vacancies in the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

The massive applicant pool is the largest in the department’s history, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Christopher Godfrey, who is in charge of the application process.

It is more than twice the size of the last group, which was tested in 1991 only to see the vacancies vanish due to last year’s county budget cuts, Godfrey said.

“We maintained records on all the individuals that applied last time, and we re-solicited them,” Godfrey said last week. “This is the largest group we’ve ever gotten.”

The sheriff’s staff on Friday morning began sending the hundreds of hopefuls--young and old, men and women--through a two-hour written exam in the Camarillo Community Center. The testing process will continue in groups of 100 or more through Monday, Godfrey said.

The written exam evaluates the applicants’ powers to analyze, summarize, recall and report facts--the kinds of language skills required in a job that often relies heavily on written reports, said Galen Tittle, one of several county personnel officials who paced around the testing room to guard against cheating.

Of the 80 who took the test, 54 passed and went on to a physical-agility test in sweltering heat on an obstacle course at the Sheriff’s Training Academy at Camarillo Airport.

Shannon Jackson and her husband, Dennis, 23-year-olds who came from Victorville to take the tests, hope the department will hire them both.

“It wasn’t bad at all,” Shannon said of the exam, after a computerized device scanned her test and declared she had exceeded the required passing grade of 70%.

As for the physical test, she said beforehand that nothing could be so tough as the sultry summer she spent in the U.S. Coast Guard’s boot camp in Cape May, N.J. “I’m not worried about it,” she added. She later passed that test, too, along with her husband.

Applicants included fresh-faced college graduates, seasoned officers from other departments and older candidates seeking a change of profession.

Peter Bishop, a wiry 49-year-old applicant from Simi Valley, asked rhetorically: “Why is such an old man in the process?” Because, he said, air-pollution agencies all but shut down his airplane-restoration business, and he was encouraged to apply by friends who are police officers.

“I think it’s just wonderful. I can take it,” Bishop said of the prospect of becoming a 50-year-old police rookie. “I’d like to get into community relations. At my age, I know I’ll have to spend a lot of time on patrol, but anything against gangs would interest me. I think the gang problem is getting out of hand.”

Moments later, Bishop was sweating his way through the physical tests, coming close to matching times with men and women half his age.

One by one, applicants hustled through the tests as best they could.

First came an agility run through a twisting course of tightly placed highway cones and concrete curbs.

Then a body drag--hauling a bulky, sagging 165-pound dummy 30 feet--followed by the challenges of scaling a six-foot chain-link fence and six-foot wooden wall, and ending with a 500-yard run.

The wall is the make-or-break point for many applicants, particularly for women, who often lack the upper-body strength to haul themselves over, said Sgt. Jean Edwards.

“Most of it is technique,” said Edwards, as grunting applicants hit the wall, competing against the clock.

“Unless you’re in really good shape, it can be frustrating,” she said. “It’s hard to get over the way men do. A lot of women don’t have any past experience with it.”

While men hoist themselves over with arms and shoulders, many of the women succeed by grabbing on and throwing a leg up to straddle the top, then hauling themselves to the other side, Edwards observed.

While Bishop scaled the wall on his second try, Shannon Jackson had to hit it four or five times, feet scrabbling for purchase before she was able to make it.

As she was trying the wall, burly Ray Mosones of Oxnard flung himself at the metal fence and flew over it, his feet never touching the top.

The ex-Channel Islands High School football player then vaulted the wood wall with the same grace and speed, drawing whoops and applause from fellow applicants.

After sprinting through the 500-yard run in short order, Mosones sat down sweating in front of sheriff’s staffer Dianna Decker, who rattled off orders on how to fill out the 25-page background check.

“I don’t want it typed, I don’t want anyone else like your wife or your girlfriend to fill it out, I want you to do it in black ink so I can see your handwriting,” Decker spat, forceful as a drill sergeant.

“It asks for a lot of addresses of your family members, your former employers,” she said. “I want the complete addresses down to the ZIP codes. There’s a lot of questions there and if there’s a question you don’t know the answer to, I want you to put N.A. for ‘no answer,’ because I want to make sure you read each and every question.”

Mosones said he looks forward to the possibility of being a Ventura County deputy or an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, where he also has applied--maybe even combatting Asian organized crime of the type that affects his own Filipino community.

“It intrigues me,” he said, gathering up his street clothes. “My major was criminal justice, and I want to use my degree. . . . While I’m still young and brash, I want to do something exciting.”

After only three of the 54 failed--all three of them women--Lt. Mark Ball said: “Few if any wash out physically . . . none of this is too difficult.”

He added: “Probably the biggest failure is people who demonstrate that they lack ethics.”

This weekend’s physical and written exams are only the beginning of a rigorous, two-month shakedown that--along with interviews, psychological testing, a deep background check and a lie-detector test--is meant to weed out the unfit, the uneducated, the unethical and the unstable.

The oral exam tends to winnow out the clueless, the “people who have no concept of what law enforcement is,” Ball said. “We ask them, ‘What do we do?’ and maybe they answer, ‘You guys give out tickets.’ ‘Well, is that all?’ They say, ‘Uh, yeah, I guess so’--and they’re outta here.”

The process also helps to eliminate the unscrupulous--candidates who admit they might do something unethical if they knew they could get away with it.

The psychological profile helps reveal whether candidates are prone to depression, addiction or other emotional weaknesses, Ball said.

The polygraph test eliminates anyone who lies about their background check. It could be something as simple as steroid use, which would not have disqualified them if they had told the truth, Ball said. Only about 5% of applicants make it through the entire process, he said.

“If they’ll lie under pressure, we don’t want them,” he said. “If you get a guy on the witness stand and he thinks it’s OK to lie to make a case, we don’t want (him). That’s the No. 1 disqualifier of people that go into the background process.”

The intense screening is designed to select only those who are worthy of six months’ training at the Sheriff’s Academy in Camarillo and holding the job of a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy, Ball said.

The academy has been rated the best in the state on final exam scores for the past two years.

“When we invest a lot of money in people,” Ball said, “we want them to succeed.”