Anticipating 100,000 new cops on their streets, city officials from across the country praised Congress for passing the $30 billion anti-crime package. But even before President Clinton signed the bill on Tuesday, criminologists warned that while quick hiring of police officers could make a dent in crime, it could also lead to more police brutality and corruption.
In one city after another -- New York, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia, Houston and Detroit -- quick expansions of the police forces have led to careless screening and hasty training. Criminal justice experts say that the rush to hire contributed to an increase in incidents like high-speed traffic accidents during chases, perjury by police officers and sloppy handling of evidence -- not to mention behavior that is outright criminal.
"All known cases of hiring unusually large numbers of police very quickly have been total disasters," said Lawrence W. Sherman, a University of Maryland professor who is chief criminologist for the Indianapolis police. "You tend to lower standards of training and selection."
The nation's capital offers an egregious case study of how the best of intentions can spawn unfortunate results, as reported in a recent Washington Post series. Five years ago, when open-air drug markets seemed as common in Washington as cherry blossoms, Congress voted to withhold $430 million in aid until the District government expanded its police force.
The city government shortened background checks for recruits and hired 1,500 officers in 20 months. Then it cut back on police academy classroom time in such areas as driving skills and investigative techniques. Not long thereafter, one in 14 of the new officers was arrested for crimes that included forgery and murder. Dozens more were found to be so untrustworthy that prosecutors refused to have them testify. And traffic accidents involving rookies led to nine deaths.
Roughly a decade before, the Reagan Administration encouraged Miami to expand its force to stem the tide of cocaine from the Caribbean. Miami obliged by hiring 600 new police officers in 1981 and 1982. The patchwork hiring may have slowed the drug trade, but the rookies accounted for most of the 60 officers suspended or dismissed in the mid-1980's for various drug-related offenses.
"Patches don't work sometimes, and that's what I think happened," Fred Taylor, director of the Metro Dade Police Department, said in a 1988 interview with Law Enforcement News.
One contributing factor, experts say, is the change in the pool of young men and women from which recruits are drawn. Gone are the days when most police officers were immigrants or sons of immigrants who had few career options and saw police work as a way of establishing themselves in American society. More recently, recruits entered police ranks after years of military training.
But without the draft, more and more police officers come from a less disciplined pool of high school graduates. "We have to be concerned," said Bernard Cohen, a Queens College professor of sociology and criminology. "We're bringing in a large number of very young officers who have been exposed to a culture of drugs and violence, and who in many ways lack the discipline of their predecessors."
The crime bill provides localities with $8.8 billion to add 100,000 officers -- a nationwide increase of nearly 20 percent -- over six years. Most of the recruiting will come in the first three years, with the Justice Department projecting that 20,000 new officers will be walking their beats within 16 months. And some cities are expected to extend their forces beyond increases allotted under the new Federal subsidies.
Alexander Weiss, a professor of criminal justice at Indiana University, said he expected that police forces with good screening and training programs would be able to handle large increases, but that forces with "systemic problems," like Washington's and New York's, would continue to have trouble.
New York plans to use its Federal money not to hire new officers but to buy computer equipment to free desk-bound people for street duty. Commissioner William J. Bratton has acknowledged that supervision of young officers is insufficient. He wants to increase the number of sergeants and strengthen training on standards of integrity that police officers are supposed to meet.
Despite the comment of Professor Sherman of the University of Maryland, police forces in several Western cities with less complex social problems, including Salt Lake City, Phoenix, San Diego and Colorado Springs, did grow in recent years without suffering scandals.
Few experts dispute that the country needs more and better-trained police officers. Through the 1980's, as the crime rate spiraled along with sales and use of crack cocaine, Federal aid to local law enforcement was eroded by inflation to lower and lower levels. As many cities found themselves strapped, the police were neglected.
The 31,000-member New York City Police Department, for example, is only 25 percent larger than the force of 40 years ago, when the annual murder rate in the city was one-sixth what it is today. Expansions of the New York force came mostly in spurts in the late 1960's and early 1990's, when city leaders responded to political pressures and declared new "wars" on crime. The New York Police Academy class of 1968 was rushed through its instruction. For the next 15 years, its ranks were plagued with corruption and brutality scandals and dismissals due to alcoholism.
The jury is still out on the most recent expansion of the New York City police (including transit and housing officers), the addition of 13,000 recruits since 1990. Rookie officers have been implicated in a cocaine-related corruption scandal that has plagued the 30th Precinct in Harlem, but so have more seasoned officers.
Senior New York personnel officials in the New York police department say that, if a young officer is going to go bad, it usually happens in two to four years. One internal police memo said sergeants viewed the rookies as "afraid to take action" and added that many rookies, in the sergeants' view, "are controlled by their social calendar rather than the demands of the job."
Another recent internal report was even more disturbing: "Many patrol officers questioned the integrity and the character of the rookies, and are reluctant to work with them for this reason."
