Many Police Jobs Vacant Due to Unqualified Candidates

GAHANNA, Ohio -- They never even got him hooked to the polygraph machine. After a few preliminary questions, the job candidate headed for the door. He wasn't going to become Gahanna's newest police officer, and he knew it.

"Some, you wonder: Why did you even come in here?" said Gahanna Deputy Police Chief Ken Bell. " Why are you wasting our time?"

Some applicants are convicted felons, others confess to drug use, and a few own up to crimes that had previously gone unnoticed. They're not fit to wear the uniform, but they're showing up increasingly at suburban police departments, looking for jobs. In some cities, the candidate pool has grown so unappealing that police chiefs say they're struggling to hire new cops.

Gahanna should have 55 officers, but it has 49. Last year, the department found just one viable candidate out of a group of about 50. In Reynoldsburg, officials had to search deep in their candidate list, too, to find just one who was fit for the job.

"It seems like our pool is probably getting a little limited, for lack of a better term," said Reynoldsburg Police Chief Jim O'Neill.

Chiefs say they're not entirely sure why a growing number of unfit candidates are drawn to law enforcement, but the perks of the job likely have a lot to do with it.

Most cop jobs don't require a college degree, and they can pay as much as $50,000 the first year. The benefits are good, too, and the work is stable. It's a potentially lifelong career when such a thing is becoming increasingly rare, and so "the quality of the candidates (is) a little bit different than 20 years ago," said Groveport Police Chief Ralph Portier. "Everybody wants to be a police officer."

But there are months of tests and checks between wanting and becoming. This is where candidates run into snags. They might have scored well on a civil-service exam, but they're not going to get far with, say, a domestic-violence conviction or a recent drunken-driving conviction.

Things can get really interesting during the polygraph exam, where unsuitable candidates either try to lie their way out of an unflattering background or admit the sins of their past. Sometimes, as in the Gahanna case, the applicant simply gives up. Other times they let loose stunning admissions.

"We've had some sex offenders," O'Neill said. "In a lot of cases, they've never been caught."

Some years ago, Gahanna moved its polygraph test earlier in the hiring process, hoping to weed out the liars and the crooks before they spent time checking references and employment history. The idea was sound in theory, but it ended up knocking nearly everyone out of contention.

"While it was designed to save us time," Bell said, "it's doing its job a little too well."

Whitehall had a similar problem several years ago, but the department there found a simple solution that seems to have worked, Chief Richard Zitzke said. It posts its hiring standards on the city website, right beside the job openings. Candidates know from the outset not to apply if they'r e shirking child support or overly fond of gambling. For the most part, they don't even try.

Zitzke said his department no longer has to reject a long string of candidates before finding a good one. And by the time a prospect gets to the polygraph, investigators are rarely shocked by what they hear.

"Typically, they'll confess to things (like), 'One time I stole my sister's coloring book when I was 6, and I still feel bad about it,'??" Zitzke said. "If that person is still thinking about that, they're not hiding anything else."

McClatchy-Tribune News Service