Garden Grove and the thinning blue line

While talking recently to a large audience about illegal immigration, Garden Grove Police Chief Joe Polisar made reference to the “No. 1 issue in law enforcement.”

Go ahead, take a guess. Take three guesses.

Immigration? Try again.

Gangs? Sorry.

Drug traffic? Nope.

The biggest problem, the chief said, is recruiting new cops. He didn’t dwell on it but noted that there are 15,000 vacancies for budgeted law enforcement jobs throughout California. The chief quickly returned to the illegal-immigration topic, but he left me wondering why such a bedrock profession has trouble selling itself.

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Carl Whitney handles recruitment for Polisar’s department. When he was trying to become a cop in the late 1980s, 400 others competed with him for jobs. At the moment, he’s looking at about 110 people for six openings with the Garden Grove department. Overall, the department is 11 people short of its projected roster of 166 sworn officers. Five of the 11 are in the police academy, but there’s nothing automatic about them making it onto the force. Of the remaining six openings, Whitney is by no means sure that he’ll find that many qualified candidates from the pool of 110.

What gives?

Lots of things, Whitney says: More professions to choose from. Less interest in public-service careers. Rigorous screening procedures. Unwillingness to put up with work schedules or the second-guessing that goes with police work.

Layered atop all that is that the baby boomer generation of cops that came on 30 years ago is now looking at attractive retirement packages that are kicking in when they’re 50.

It all adds up to openings that aren’t being filled in Garden Grove and throughout the state.

Garden Grove wants a police force that reflects its ethnically diverse citizenry, Whitney says. In particular, the department is having trouble luring people from the Vietnamese American population, representing about one-third of its population. Only one of the department’s street cops speaks Vietnamese, he says.

Whitney is 37 and loves being a cop. He’s new to recruiting but has a game plan to hit the high schools and colleges and job fairs and whoever else will listen. If only, he says, young people could see what he saw when he got his first look at a police station.

“What I liked was the camaraderie, the teamwork, that everyone was striving for the same goal,” he says. “Every day was different. You never knew what was going to happen. One minute you could be having coffee with the guys, and the next minute you could be driving down the street, with lights and siren, chasing a bank robber.”

No longer, it seems, does that potential appeal to the masses.

Whitney thinks good-cops-in-waiting are still out there, but he’s also got his eyes wide open. The younger generation has grown up in a different world, he says. “They want to go somewhere where they can make money. Coming out here and chasing bad guys through backyards and working graveyard shifts might not be something they would want to do.”

That’s still part of the job, but it probably would surprise the Generation X crowd to know that Garden Grove cops, for example, work three-days shifts of 12 1/2 hours each. And that they can start on the force at more than $50,000 a year.

But, of course, they have to like the work, which comes with fair amounts of bitter and sweet.

Whitney worries that potential applicants may pick up on “so much negativity toward law enforcement, especially in the news media, that if cops do one thing bad, they’re judged for the next six months for a decision they had to make within 15 to 30 seconds.”

How does he counter that? “They have to have that innate public service drive within them, and they’ve got to put that stuff aside and say that despite everything that happens negatively, they still want to do this job.”

Polisar hasn’t insisted that departmental numbers match the city’s almost even breakdown of white, Latino and Vietnamese residents. But he’d like it to, Whitney says, because it inspires more community trust and the ability to relate to the police. But the older generation of Vietnamese brought with it an inherent mistrust of police and public officials, in general, and this has hurt recruiting efforts of next generation, Whitney says.

That all sounds like enough to get a guy down, but Whitney says he’s looking forward to the challenge.

“I try to sell the fact that they’re going to be part of something special,” he says. “The variety is what keeps people interested. It’s not the typical job where you have to show up at your cubicle and you’re pushing the same numbers and looking at the same spreadsheets.”

That’s the pitch. Now he just has to go sell it.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.