May You Be With the Force

Police Chief Andrew J. Scott III carries a badge and a gun. And a pizza, if that’s what it takes these days to get his man or woman.

Tonight, however, Scott has his hands free as he arrives at dusk at a home in the Palm Beach County community of Boynton Beach. Standing in the driveway is the man Scott is looking for, a security guard named Jim Brown.

Scott hasn’t come to slap the cuffs on Brown but to meet the 38-year-old former Coast Guardsman, his family and a colleague from work over dinner and deliver an in-person pitch on why he should apply for a job at the Boca Raton Police Department.

“I want to see you, eyeball to eyeball,” Scott, spiffily turned out in his Class A dress blues, tells Brown. “I want you to know that my investment in you is going to be $100,000, and I want to get that back.”

Although the prestige of law enforcement arguably has never been higher because of the courage and devotion of police officers on Sept. 11, finding men and women to wear the uniform and risk their lives to enforce the law has never been more problematic for many of the country’s 18,000 police departments.

Because of multiple factors--the large cohort of Vietnam War veterans now retiring, more stringent educational requirements, better-paying jobs in the private sector--America’s thin blue line has never seemed thinner.

“I don’t know any police department that can say right now: ‘We’ve got enough people,’ ” said Officer Jack Richter, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD, which has an authorized strength of 10,196 sworn personnel, has 8,910 officers.

If any city should have experienced a surge in applications since Sept. 11, it would be New York. But the number of candidates there who signed up to take the entry exam has actually dropped in the last year. Meanwhile, the number of retiring officers soared by 87%. For Raymond W. Kelly, the new police commissioner, replenishing the ranks is a priority, and New York’s finest are hardly alone.

“It’s been much more of a challenge over the last decade as police everywhere have struggled with trying to recruit a new generation and filling the ranks of the people who have been in policing 20 to 25 years and are now getting ready to retire,” said Elaine Deck, project coordinator at the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, a professional organization based in Alexandria, Va.

To help the nation’s smaller police departments, Deck runs seminars on how to recruit and train personnel. “Everyone is going back to square one to see how to promote police work,” she said.

In Sunnyvale, Calif., the public safety department now tries to entice candidates by promising them training and jobs as both police officers and firefighters, with assignments on a rotating basis. Like many law enforcement agencies today, the Beaufort County, S.C., sheriff’s office lets employees take their cruisers home and pays a $1,200 bonus for recruits who speak Spanish well.

In New York City, Commissioner Kelly has said he will ask the state Legislature to allow his officers to get some retirement benefits while still working, in hopes that will staunch the outflow.

One unscientific but informative barometer for the employment situation can be found in the pages of American Police Beat, the largest-circulation newspaper for police officers. Donna Markussen, who works in advertising sales, reports only a “slight drop” since Sept. 11 in the number of ads placed by departments looking to hire.

“It’s still a bad scenario for most agencies,” said Markussen, speaking from the monthly’s offices in Cambridge, Mass. “They can’t get enough applicants.” Departments are so chronically hungry for people that some, including the Louisiana State Police and the Seattle Police, have been buying ads for three years straight, she said.

One of the new complications, say specialists, is that Generation Xers, unlike the stereotypically rumpled police sergeants and detectives of TV and moviedom, are not ready to toil for years on modest salaries in exchange for a pension two decades or more down the road.

“You’ve got to front-load the benefits and raise the level of salaries to get the more educated person,” said Sgt. Steven Brancazio, in charge of hiring and training in Boca Raton. This year, Boca Raton raised the starting salary of its officers by more than $3,000, to $37,980. Despite the boost, and plenty of other benefits, the 162-person department has nine openings.

“The difference with the Generation Xers is, when I came on I was grateful to have a job,” said Scott, who has nearly a quarter-century of experience in police work. “The new generation wants higher pay, more benefits and will quickly go to another organization for $1,000 more a year.”

Potential recruits these days also want to hone their skills to be able to earn more or advance in their careers. Which is why some departments, such as that of Arlington, Texas, are offering to reimburse their officers’ college tuition expenses as an employment sweetener.

Though educational and other hiring criteria have gotten tougher, the salaries offered by some municipalities have lagged significantly behind many would-be officers’ expectations. According to the police chiefs association, entry-level salaries now average $29,000 to $32,000, but drop to as low as $20,000 in poor rural communities.

Among the consequences: Some police jobs in Oklahoma have been vacant for more than a year. In Arkansas, some officers apply for food stamps to make ends meet for their families. In Illinois, communities have reported a steady eight-year decline in the volume of applicants.

Typically, police departments now “want somebody who has a higher educational background, as opposed to somebody just coming out of high school, like years ago,” said Markussen of American Police Beat. “When you have this education, you expect to get paid for it, and they’re not.”

During the Clinton administration, a program called COPS (Community-Oriented Policing Services) gave money to local departments to help them hire more officers. The program has taken a major hit in the budget proposed by the Bush White House, which wants to cut the funding for new hires by $370 million. The Justice Department contends the open-ended goal of COPS--100,000 additional officers--has been met and that the money can be better spent elsewhere.

Top police officials acknowledge that, with the continuing threat of terrorism, there are new national requirements in law enforcement--for example, a federal force to guarantee security at U.S. airports. But they contend no institution is more vital in safeguarding Americans’ lives and property than their departments and that many need continuing federal assistance to add people or purchase modern crime-fighting and communications equipment.

“In light of what happened on 9/11, our priorities as a country have changed,” said Bill Berger, chief of the North Miami Beach Police Department and president of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police. “But the people who are going to attempt to harm Americans in the future are probably going to be apprehended by local police, not federal. The first line of homeland defense, after terrorists get past the borders, are the men and women of state and local police.”

For Boca Raton, which recently lost 35 of its officers to early retirement, recruiting has come to mean going after potential police officers the same way top colleges hunt for athletes.

Chief Scott will drive to candidates’ homes, meet their families over dinner and answer questions posed by parents, spouses, children or friends. If need be, the chief will even bring pizza.

The innovative approach, paid for by a local civic-minded company, was the idea of a self-defined “loose cannon” of the advertising trade, Stan Cotton. He believes that to recruit good police officers, you have to recruit their families as well.

“People are more willing to send a child to Bosnia or Afghanistan than to see him become a neighborhood policeman,” Cotton maintains. And he thinks the task of recruiting has gotten harder, not easier, since Sept. 11.

“The amount of new security demands in every city, corporation and bus station has drained the people who otherwise would have been cops,” Cotton said.

To get the Boca Raton brass and an applicant’s family together in a relaxed setting, Cotton came up with a “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” advertisement that’s been published in area newspapers. It introduces the 46-year-old Scott, alerts job candidates that he’s available for a “heart-to-heart” chat over dinner at their home and adds that if they’re nervous about cooking, they can just tell the chief to “bring takeout.”

Tonight, though, Brown and his wife, Connie, are providing the meal. Arrayed on the kitchen counter, there’s fried chicken from a supermarket deli, baked beans, potato salad, deviled eggs and a chocolate cake that Connie Brown’s mother, Anna Friend, 77, made from scratch.

Judah, 10, one of three orphans the Browns adopted from Russia, buzzes excitedly around Scott and Brancazio as soon as the strangers in blue have crossed the threshold. Asked by the boy to explain what he does, Scott says he’s “kind of like a general.”

Their plates piled with food, the adults repair to the dining room. Brother-in-law Craig Evans, 54, and uncle Randy Gailey, 51, who are there to lend Brown moral support, also take their seats. So does Warren Perris, 33, a colleague from work who also is interested in becoming a policeman.

Brown tells Scott his heart has been in law enforcement since high school and that in the Coast Guard he spent eight years on drug interdiction missions. He’s not making enough money as a security guard, “and I’ve got a big family to support.” He could have taken a job with the Florida Highway Patrol, Brown says, but he couldn’t take six months away from home to attend training.

“I expect a very good and hard day’s work for a good day’s pay,” Scott replies between bites. “I don’t want drones. I want someone who is creatively addressing the problems affecting the citizenry.”

Connie Brown assures the chief she doesn’t worry when her husband comes home late from work. She’s been listening to Scott describe the kind of officer he wants to hire, she says, “and I’m sitting here saying, ‘That’s Jim.’ ”

The question of danger comes up. “I’ve been in the business for 24 years, and I’m pretty much unscathed,” Scott replies. Later, the chief notes that the question of risk on the job is one that was never raised in traditional police job interviews. He even wants to know whether Brown’s three children know what he might be getting into.

Since the ads encouraging would-be officers to invite Scott for dinner were printed Dec. 7, Boca Raton police have received 330 telephone inquiries and 35 dinner invitations. The contacts have led to the hiring of one police officer and seven people now working as dispatchers.

“Overall, the campaign has been overwhelmingly successful,” says Scott, who finds the get-togethers help him judge how deep a candidate’s commitment is to becoming a cop. Brown, who has filled out an application and is now awaiting the results of a check into his background, seems just as enthusiastic.

“It lit a fire in me” to join, he says.