Officials Defend Eased Drug Rules for LAPD Hires

Under fire for hiring recruits who experimented with hard drugs in their youth, Los Angeles Police Department officials went on the offensive Tuesday, saying drug use on the force has not increased since employment standards were relaxed in 2004.

Chief William J. Bratton told the Police Commission that while officers have undergone 30,000 random drug tests over the last decade and a half, only 15 tested positive.

In fact, the numbers have been declining since the department dropped its total ban on hiring anyone who had used or encountered hard drugs. That change permitted the hiring of six officers who admitted once having had a limited use of cocaine in their distant pasts.

Critics of the policy shift have “made a mountain out of a molehill,” Bratton told the panel. “In the random testing we are not encountering any major concerns at all.”

Commissioners sounded satisfied with the explanation, saying the new policy reflects changing times.

“The reality is in 2006 there is a very good likelihood that a young person may have tried drugs on a limited basis,” commission President John Mack said.

While the Police Commission was a sympathetic audience, police officials will probably face a more skeptical response from L.A. City Council members when they make their case to the council’s personnel committee in the next two weeks. The committee is chaired by Councilman Dennis Zine, who along with councilmen Bernard C. Parks and Greig Smith has criticized the policy change.

The Police Commission asked for the briefing on an issue that Mack acknowledged has sparked “great controversy.”

Debate over the drug policy turned acrimonious recently when five council members called for a Police Commission investigation of Bratton for making “unprofessional” comments, including a statement that critics of the hiring change “don’t know what the hell they are talking about.”

Parks, the former police chief, and Zine, a former police sergeant, have complained that the council was not included in any discussions before the hiring ban was changed.

Zine said Tuesday that he has serious questions for the chief when his committee hears the issue.

“I have no problem with recreational and experimental use” by recruits when they were young, Zine said. “But it’s gone beyond that. I have a problem with hard drug use.”

The councilman, who remains a reserve police officer, said a recruit who has used marijuana more than 75 times or hard drugs several times is a potential problem for a department that saw officers stealing drugs as part of the Rampart Division police corruption scandal in the late 1990s.

“I understand that the pool of people who want to be police officers is limited, but if you look at the history of the department, and the scandals we have had, we don’t want to add to that problem,” Zine said.

The Civil Service Commission, not the City Council, has the authority to change policy on hiring standards, LAPD officials said.

Until 2004, the city lumped cocaine in with heroin, LSD and other hard drugs that automatically disqualified candidates for the police force.

The policy was changed to allow recruits who have used cocaine once or twice before they were 25 years old and when that use was at least 10 years in the past, said Phyllis Lynes, assistant general manager of the city Personnel Department.

“We believe no one has been hired or will be hired that presents any risk whatsoever to this city and the citizens of this city,” Lynes told the commission.

At the same time, the policy was toughened on marijuana use. Recruits can be disqualified if they have used marijuana more than 75 times or at all in the last two years. Previously, marijuana use was disqualifying if it occurred in the previous year.

The policies were changed based on expert research. The LAPD standard is tougher than the FBI’s on hard drug use but less stringent on marijuana use, according to Deputy Chief Sharon Papa.

Bratton said the hiring process also includes polygraph testing designed to weed out recruits who lie about their drug use.