Screening Out Bad Cops No Easy Task

Who is fit to wear a badge?

The question rarely has seemed more pressing than in 1995, a year that has seen arrests, scandals and corruption taint the reputation of police departments in major cities across the country.

To become a police officer, recruits must undergo a battery of tests that includes a psychological exam, and complete a rigorous academy training that puts them under the close scrutiny of veteran cops serving as instructors.

The tests are designed to weed out unstable personalities, but trainers concede that no system is perfect. The result is that the filters can fail to screen out a cop such as former Los Angeles Detective Mark Fuhrman, who touched off a firestorm of criticism with his taped descriptions of targeting interracial couples, planting evidence and torturing minority suspects.

“A guy like this being a cop for years, and having the feelings he apparently has, well, it raises the issue of testing,” said Newport Beach Police Sgt. Ron Rodgers, who teaches at Golden West Police Academy in Huntington Beach. “We need to learn from this. . . . We need to integrate into the psychological testing something that will catch these kinds of attitudes.”

But Fullerton forensic psychologist Bruce Danto said racism, for instance, is difficult to pin down in an interview situation.

“No one in their right mind is going to say, ‘Yes, I am a racist’ when you ask them,” said Danto, a former Michigan street cop and homicide investigator. “The only way to ferret out something like that is through supervision. Careful supervision is irreplaceable. You need to see these people in action.”

Background checks, the intense supervision at the academy level and probationary stints as rookie officers provide the best opportunities to screen out those with racist or other attitudes that could color the way they do their jobs, Danto said. It also is vital that department leaders impress upon rank-and-file officers that aberrant behavior and excesses be reported.

“It’s all about leadership,” Danto said. “Role models are vital. The guys that work with the bad cop are the ones who know what’s going on. They need to feel it’s acceptable to step forward and say something. That’s not an easy thing to do.”

Police insist Fuhrman and his ilk are anomalies, the rare rogue cops who make up only a tiny percentage of the law enforcement ranks. But the attitudes of all cops on matters of race and culture are important in a diverse society, so academy recruits undergo 54 hours of cultural diversity classes, said Lt. David Milewski, commander of the Orange County Sheriff’s Training Academy.

The education includes “field trips” to cultural centers, restaurants and communities that represent different cultural groups, Milewski said.

“The better in-tune the recruits are to the people in the community, the better the police officers we put on the street will be,” he said.