01:00 AM EST on Friday, January 15, 2010

PROVIDENCE — Four Rhode Island municipalities and the Narragansett Indian Tribe will be hiring 26 new police officers, thanks to a $6.5-million grant from the federal government.

The funds are part of the economic stimulus plan. The money will pay for three years of salary and benefits for 13 officers in Providence, worth $3.53 million; 6 in Pawtucket for $1.76 million; 4 in Woonsocket at $666,024; 2 in Central Falls for $426,664 and 1 for the Narragansett tribe for $133,989.

The terms of the grant require the municipalities keep officers hired or retained with the grant money on the payroll for at least one year after the three-year subsidy expires.

Providence Police Chief Dean M. Esserman said the award means Providence will have 13 new cadets in the class at the municipal training academy that begins next month. In Pawtucket, Chief George Kelley III said the money will cover six cadets in the current academy class, which is slated to graduate in March.

About $1 billion was available nationally for the program, half of it targeted at cities with populations of more than 150,000. All the police departments that applied were judged, in part, on their community policing plans.

Bernard K. Melekian, director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services Office, the agency administering the grants, said there was no set definition of what community policing should be, but his agency looked for departments that had accurately assessed their community’s problems and had developed specific programs to deal with them.

The idea was more than simply having more officers walking the beat, he said. It was to get police departments to look for ways to work more closely with other agencies, such as probation departments, social service agencies, even municipal planning departments.

That way, he said, the grants not only encouraged the development of community policing programs, they provided the departments with the resources to enact them.

John Hill

For the first time in almost four years, the Camden Police Department is hiring officers.

On Thursday, 49 Camden police recruits began their 20 weeks of physical and mental training required to be on the force. At the same time, department officials continued with plans to bring on 25 officers by the end of February through a separate hiring process.

The 25 officers were hired through an alternate, expedited process.

Department officials currently are reviewing 78 candidates for those positions.

“I’m glad to see it. The hiring of officers is long overdue,” said John Williamson, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1.

In the past few years, the number of officers fell from about 440 to around 360 this fall, said Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson.

To help fill the critical staffing need, state officials gave the department authorization in October to hire 25 new officers from across the state through the alternate hiring process.

As part of the alternate hiring program, candidates already must have taken the civil service exam and graduated from an accredited police academy.

Under the hiring guidelines, the alternate route applicants did not have to meet the city’s residency requirement.

Of the 49 standard recruits, 36 of them were brought on through the traditional process and are city residents, Thomson said.

More than 230 city residents were on a list of potential candidates for the positions.

“We hired only the best,” Thomson said. “We set an uncompromisingly high standard and Camden’s people answered the call.”

The city’s hiring policy requires those seeking to become entry-level police officers or firefighters to reside in the city when they take the civil service exam until the day they are appointed. After exhausting qualified local candidates, the city would consider those from Camden County, then elsewhere in New Jersey and finally out-of-state residents, in accordance with civil service procedures.

After completing the academy, Thomson said the officers will undergo three months of field training with the department.

Thomson said the additional officers will help to build on the success the department saw this year in reducing the reported number of major crimes to a 40-year low.

“We have made great gains this past year and we will reclaim even more neighborhoods with the additional boots on the ground,” he said.

Reach George Mast at (856) 486-2465 at gmast@camden.gannett.com

Chicago SunTimes
BY FRAN SPIELMAN AND FRANK MAIN Staff Reporters
http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/1975918,CST-NWS-policeexam06web.article#

The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets the minimum education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams — and for good reason, experts say.

A decision on dropping the police entrance exam could come later this week.

CURRENT CPD EDUCATION QUALIFICATIONS

Calling an application-only process a “step backward” and the “wrong way to go,” Woods said, “When you lower your quality, you will get poor police service and more complaints. … Whenever you make it easier to be the police, you’re doing the citizens and the Police Department a disservice.”

Charlie Roberts, who ran the training division from 1995 to 1999, noted that there are “eleven tracks” recruits must go through in the police academy, including the law and the municipal code.

“If you don’t give someone at least a reading comprehension test, can you just put them in and risk the possibility of having so many of them fail? That could get quite expensive,” Roberts said.

“We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you’ll get if you have no screening process?”

Human Resources Department spokesperson Connie Buscemi acknowledged Tuesday that the Daley administration has been exploring other “options” since last fall, when a “request-for-proposals” for companies interested in preparing an on-line police entrance exam was cancelled.

The last police entrance exam was held on Nov. 5, 2006.

“We wanted to try to develop something on-line to allow the city to accommodate members of the U.S. military who are on active duty. But, we didn’t get any responses that met our needs. No one said they could administer an on-line exam” and guarantee its integrity, Buscemi said.

“We’re [now] reviewing our options on how to administer the police application process.”

Other sources confirmed that the police entrance exam could be scrapped altogether “to open up the process to as many people as possible.” A final decision could be made later this week.

Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue said the idea “sounds too stupid to be true.”

“You need a testing process. … You need to be very concerned about the very limited information you would get from just a screening and application process,” Donahue said.

Hiring and promotions in the Police and Fire Departments have generated controversy in Chicago for as long as anyone can remember.

The criticism reached a crescendo in 1994 after a sergeants exam produced just five minority promotions out of 114.

The test was the first to be administered by the city after “race-norming” — the practice of adjusting scores on the basis of race — was ruled unconstitutional.

In November 2005, City Hall announced plans to offer the police entrance exam a record four times the following year — and for the first time on the Internet — after an unprecedented outreach campaign that bolstered the number of minority applicants to 34 percent black, 24 percent Hispanic and 26 percent women.

More than two years later, black ministers told newly-appointed Police Supt. Jody Weis that, if he was serious about re-establishing trust between police and the black community, he should start by hiring and promoting more African Americans.

The Police Department is currently operating at least 2,000 officers-a-day short of authorized strength, counting vacancies, medical leave and limited duty.

Mayor Daley’s 2010 budget uses federal stimulus funds to add just 86 officers, 30 of them for the CTA.

That’s nowhere near enough hiring to solve a manpower shortage that, Weis fears, will get dramatically worse when as many as 1,000 more officers retire later this year.

Tulsa Police Chief Ron Palmer gave 155 officers pink slips today, amid city budget problems.  The officers laid off are the lowest-ranking officers who were most recently hired.  They will be getting 2 weeks’ severance pay, along with any unused comp time and vacation time.  Many of the officers had to go to work today and will be on the job until the layoffs take effect next Friday.  The layoffs represent nearly 20% of the total TPD force.  The officers’ last day of work will be January 29^th.  The layoffs will bring the police force to 653.  That is the fewest number of officers Tulsa has had in more than 20 years.

Chief Palmer, who announced his resignation today, delivered the news to the officers affected at the police academy.

“One of my last duties is probably one of my most unpleasant duties, that is telling these kids they’re going to be laid off next week,” said Palmer.

But this is not a done deal.  Union leaders are still negotiating with the mayor and if they come to an agreement in the next seven days, those pink slips can be taken back.

Unlike the fire department, the mayor has not offered to tap the reserve fund to help the police department’s budget.  The union expects to vote on a proposal next week.

Other cities have expressed interest in hiring some of Tulsa’s officers.  The police departments in Austin and Garland, Texas are expected to make recruitment visits to Tulsa soon.

By David Zahniser and Maeve Reston
January 22, 2010

Even as city officials plan to shed 1,000 jobs to patch a nearly $200-million budget gap, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa intends to continue hiring police officers, a top aide said Thursday.

Deputy Chief of Staff Matt Szabo said Villaraigosa wants to keep recruiting enough officers to replace those who resign or retire — leaving the Police Department with 9,963 sworn officers — as he and the City Council press ahead with major reductions elsewhere.

“I think there’s consensus on that concept,” Szabo said.

Villaraigosa and five council members tried to display unity Thursday by releasing a letter calling for the job cuts. Yet at least two council members who signed the document, Bernard C. Parks and Jan Perry, said the city also needs to halt police hiring to balance the budget.

“I don’t think you can avoid it,” Parks said at a panel discussion hosted by the Central City Assn., a downtown business group. The session was titled “Is L.A. On the Road to Bankruptcy?”

“You don’t continue to hire more people when you have people taking furloughs,” said Perry, at a separate event.

Parks and Perry made their remarks hours after the city’s top budget analyst revealed that midyear tax revenue is $186 million lower than expected. Tax revenue has declined by double digits for four straight quarters, the worst drop since the Great Depression, City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana said.

To deal with the downturn, Villaraigosa and council members have agreed to slash payroll costs by allowing 2,400 civilian employees to retire up to five years early. But the city’s budget picture is so dire that Santana predicted 1,000 jobs would need to be eliminated, in addition to the 1,000 mentioned in Villaraigosa’s letter, over the next two years to keep the city afloat.

“Our revenues are not going to catch up to the costs of our pension system and our salaries and benefits. [They're] just not,” he said.

Szabo said hundreds of layoffs would probably be avoided if the city allowed additional employees to take early retirement. Or they could be moved to jobs not paid for by the city’s general fund, which covers basic services including public safety. City leaders would also begin looking at services that can be done more cheaply by private contractors, he said.

“Our job is to make sure the job gets done, not necessarily to make sure it’s done by a city employee,” Szabo said.

That concept drew fire from a spokesman for the Coalition of L.A. Unions, which represents 22,000 city workers. Outsourcing city jobs would do little to solve the city’s fiscal crisis and is not “structural change,” said Victor Gordo, secretary-treasurer for the Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 777.

“All it does is take money from employees and opens the door to giving it to private contractors, and in the end, it’s the people of Los Angeles who will be left holding the bag,” Gordo said.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

maeve.reston@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

See all the winners here: http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/Default.asp?Item=2208

One interesting note: Oakland, CA PD = approximately $19M. New York State total = approximately $19M.

However, while we think staffing leaders want to understand what is going on in all relevant corners of their world, the recent Supreme Court decision on the Ricci case (which may eventually have some bearing on testing) is confusing. The problem is that it is a complex finding and, while it will certainly be dissected for the next few months offering lawyers, EEO experts and psychologists extra exposure on webinars, our simplified [and arguably biased] take in a few somewhat declarative sentences follows:

1. The City of New Haven uses a written test to determine whether to promote firefighters to a “command” position.

2. The test adversely affects minorities i.e. they do significantly poorer.

3. The City refused to accept the results of their own test because the results were “discriminatory.” The guys and gals who took the test and came out on top were upset and cried foul.

4. The Supreme Court refused to accept the city’s argument. The results stand.

5. In sustaining the original results, the Supreme Court said that the City gave the test and now they need to live with the results.

6. The Supreme Court also said that the City poorly argued that the test wasn’t valid in the first place and so they had to assume it was valid until it was proven that it wasn’t. (Lots of experts support the notion that the written test in question aka the “book learning” approach lacks any connection to the reality of what it takes to lead firefighters. Unfortunately, the [so called] experts argue among themselves about the best way to measure validity and ended up confusing the court.)

Bottom line, the Supreme Court supports scientific selection which on its face cannot be ignored simply because a specific group does poorly. The Supreme Court, however, is not saying that you can get away with a test that discriminates if it is NOT truly valid.

However, the ruling was close and a minority [no pun intended] decision by Ginsburg championed a new notion that “diversity” is a “primary objective in staffing.” This has a lot of folks up in arms who think (as most of us do) that hiring candidates who will perform well is the primary objective and that doing it fairly to ensure the successful candidates are, in fact, diverse is what we are talking about.

In the short run, if you validate against performance, you will have fewer problems. If you recruit against criteria you’ve validated, simply make sure your diverse candidates all meet the same bar. Tom Janz, another staffing standards group leader, sent us this link to SIOP content and a few notes which prompted my blog. Thanks Tom (another PhD we can understand).

Twenty-six police agencies in 16 states are barred from receiving shares of $1 billion in federal stimulus money to hire more officers after misusing millions of dollars in prior aid, Justice Department documents show.
The Amtrak Police Department and agencies in two New Jersey cities, Newark and Camden, are among the largest departments barred from getting new aid for hiring police. All of the agencies agreed to bans on new grants for up to three years rather than pay back about $7.1 million to the government, the documents show.

In doing so, the police agencies forfeit an important funding source to help protect the public during the economic downturn. In return, the federal government is giving up its claim on millions of dollars in misused grant funds.

“We’re just trying to find money to retain good employees,” says Morehouse Parish, La., Sheriff Mike Tubbs, whose department defaulted on $280,276 by failing to adequately document how the money was spent. The agency is nearing the end of its ban but won’t be eligible for the new hiring funds. “I may have to lay off some people.”

The bans stem from grants issued under the Clinton-era police hiring program known as Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). The largest federally funded law enforcement build-up in U.S. history provided money for more than 100,000 officers starting in 1995. The Obama administration revived the program in its $787 billion stimulus package, allocating $1 billion to hire up to 6,000 officers during the next three years.

Several federal agencies keep lists of entities and people banned from doing business with the government. But Brian Miller, the General Services Administration’s inspector general, says there is “inconsistency across the government” in how grant suspensions and bans are decided.

“We have an obligation to ensure that money gets to the places best equipped to handle it,” Justice spokesman David Buchanan says.

Police agencies from Connecticut to Arizona are barred from getting the Justice funds. Violations include various misuses of money, such as failing to hire the officers funded by the grants. Defaults are calculated based on the amount of grant money allegedly misused.Among the violators:

• The Amtrak Police Department, which defaulted on a 1997 grant to hire 10 extra officers, accepted a three-year ban rather than repay $241,628 it owes the government for failing to hire and retain the officers, Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black says.

Despite that ban until the end of 2009, Amtrak gets a share of a separate $450 million in transportation stimulus money to upgrade safety and security. “We chose to let the (ban) expire because we had funding from other sources,” Black says.

• The Waterbury, Conn., Police Department blamed ex-city officials for its nearly $1.9 million debt to the Justice Department. Police Lt. Chris Corbett says the administration of former Mayor Philip Giordano — who was sentenced to 37 years in prison in 2003 for sexually abusing two young girls — improperly diverted the 1998 grant money for other uses.

• The Camden Police Department is on the banned list until 2010 because the city can’t afford to repay $565,000 in grant violations, Police Inspector Michael Lynch says. He blamed prior police administrations for the infractions, including failing to provide reliable budget data to support grant use.

“We’re turning over every rock to find more money now,” he says, adding the city has contacted the Justice Department to try to resolve the debt. “We’re going to have to deal with it.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House has approved federal funds to help local police departments hire and retain 50,000 officers over the next five years.

The House vote was an endorsement for the Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, grant program, which struggled to survive under the Bush administration.

COPS was created in 1994 by the Clinton administration, which saw it as a vehicle to put 100,000 new beat cops on the nation’s streets. But the Bush White House consistently tried to cut its budget, arguing that it was not cost-effective.

The economic stimulus plan enacted in February also contained $1 billion for the COPS program to help cash-strapped police departments keep and hire officers.

The House-passed bill approves $1.8 billion a year over five years for COPS. It now goes to the Senate.

PROVIDENCE — For nearly a year, city officials have been planning the 66th police training academy, intent on keeping up the size of the police force as the crime rate increased.

But the city’s fiscal crisis has overwhelmed that plan, and the academy has been put off indefinitely. Police Chief Dean M. Esserman is now jumping into President Obama’s $4-billion stimulus sweepstakes for law enforcement, eager to win a grant to hire the novice officers who would graduate.

The Police Department had made a special effort to recruit members of minority groups for the academy, trying to ensure that its ranks would better reflect Providence’s predominant population of racial and ethnic minorities. And Mayor David N. Cicilline arranged passage of a law to indirectly give minority group members a preference in hiring.

In mid-October, the city announced recruitment for an academy, advertised in foreign-language publications and urged the leaders of minority groups to persuade candidates to come forward. Applications from 1,264 candidates poured in during a six-week enlistment period, and the department winnowed the number to 299 after conducting written aptitude and physical tests.

That is where the process stopped, as the department waited for the City Council and the mayor to enact an ordinance granting city residents preference in hiring. Cicilline announced the proposed preference in January and acknowledged that, given the city’s demographic complexion, the initiative would be expected to advance more minority candidates in the competition.

The preference was adopted last month, but then the academy was quietly called off.

“The academy that we had planned for … April has been postponed indefinitely due to the financial problems that the city is facing right now,” said Deputy Police Chief Paul J. Kennedy.

Esserman and his commanders for years have used the expression “cops count” to drive home a point that the number of officers wisely deployed can decrease the incidence of crime. The force now stands at 482, or 7 fewer than authorized in the original city budget for fiscal 2009. That complement may dwindle without an academy to graduate the planned 20 to 30 officers to compensate for attrition due to retirement and other reasons.

Crime last year surged by 12 percent, and violent crime by 19 percent — although a change in the way records are kept skewed the rate upward. In the first quarter of 2009, however, the rate of crime declined by 17 percent compared with the same quarter a year earlier. Violent crime went up again, by 4 percent.

“The grim reality is that as the economy worsens, crime tends to rise and you need more police, not fewer,” said Maj. Stephen M. Melaragno, police director of administration.

Cicilline declared that public safety remains his number-one priority and that he will do everything he can to maintain the size of the force. The pace of retirements, he said, has slowed of late.

The mayor has a $16.1-million operating budget deficit for the fiscal year that ends June 30. All departments, including the police, were ordered to draw up options for spending reductions of 5 percent or 10 percent, with either option to be invoked within the fiscal year depending on the severity of the crisis.

Esserman has acknowledged that he intends to apply for aid under the Department of Justice COPS program — Community-Oriented Policing Services — to have the money necessary to hire officers. Only if he wins a grant would it then make sense to hold an academy.

“That’s our plan,” he said. “…That’s what we’re working towards.”

The cost of operating the academy and the likely cost of hiring the officers were not immediately available Wednesday. Providence police recruits are paid minimum wage while they attend the four-month academy and an entry-level officer is paid an annual salary of $47,272 plus fringe benefits.

If Esserman lands money from the COPS program it would be a reward of sorts for the time and effort that he and Cicilline have invested in the Obama administration. The chief and the Democratic mayor have been among those who successfully lobbied the administration and Congress for more aid for cities, and law enforcement in particular.

COPS has swelled to $1 billion, thanks to an infusion of money from the economic stimulus law known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Police departments may apply for money on a competitive basis under a COPS category called CHIRP — COPS Hiring Recovery Program — that would cover the cost of hiring police officers at entry-level pay and benefits for three years. After three years, departments would be obliged to keep the officers on the payroll.

If Esserman gets the money to hire academy graduates, the department intends to proceed with the screening of its current crop of 299 recruits rather than restart the recruitment process from the beginning.

Over the years, the selection of recruits repeatedly has been hampered by litigation as people pressed claims that they were treated unfairly. Cicilline said initially that the Providence residency preference would be retroactively applied to the current crop although only insiders would have known about the planned preference before it was announced.

To avoid possible litigation, Kennedy said the department has since decided that it will not apply the preference to the current recruits.