Pre-Employment Background Investigations for Public Safety Professionals

Frank A. Colaprete

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781466566743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Personalmanagement

***Author Radio InterviewJoin Dr. Frank A. Colaprete for an upcoming interview on the Privacy Piracy show on KUCI 88.9FM. Click here on September 2nd, 2013 at 8: 00 a.m. PST to listen in.Pre-employment investigations have been the subject of intense review and debate since 9/11 made the vetting of applicants a critical function of every organization

1	Practical Implications of Pre-Employment Investigations

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• To develop a historical understanding of the issues that both positively and negatively impact the pre-employment investigation process for public safety organizations

• To develop an appreciation for the importance of the pre-employment investigation process in a public safety organization

• To develop an understanding of the predominant factors affecting applicant attrition rates as well as the predictive factors of the pre-employment investigation process

• To develop an understanding of the transitive nature of recruitment, selection, and training in the organization’s future success and how they impact succession planning processes

KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS

• Objectives of a pre-employment investigation for public safety personnel

• Applicant attrition rates

• Recruiting process needs

• Social and organizational issues of the public safety personnel selection processes

• Risk management

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the history of American law enforcement, there has been a requirement to screen applicants for the characteristics and behaviors of service, dedication, and integrity. Born from heated discussions of the causes of police corruption that have continued since the early nineteenth century, the need for law enforcement personnel who are devoid of corrupt behaviors is self-evident.¹ There is unilateral agreement that the screening processes of law enforcement applicants must include disqualifying parameters that include those who have arrest records and poor employment histories.² While the issue of police corruption and abuse of power had been an ongoing discussion as evidenced by the Wickersham Report and the Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement since the early twentieth century, little was accomplished until the mid-twentieth century at the dawn of the civil rights movement.³ The most sweeping changes began to occur as a result of the findings of the report of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967) that among other recommendations advised law enforcement to make significant changes to their selection processes.⁴ This is a direct result of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and the precursor of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) all put in motion the methods to improve police effectiveness in controlling crime and improving community relations.⁵

Fast forward a few decades, and in the post-9/11 era, society has been forced into a newly heightened and galvanized awareness that also constructively mandates mainstream American businesses to require criminal records checks on prospective employees.⁶ The background investigation, and more appropriately titled character investigation, is the predominant method used to ascertain if these positive traits exist in the applicant’s character.⁷ Sadly, that has not been the result in many, many instances. For law enforcement, the background or pre-employment investigation is the most critical step in assessing the prospective applicant’s fit for entry into what still is the most honorable of positions one can serve in, a police officer charged with the responsibility of protecting the free society we have all come to enjoy. There is an expectation, and rightly so, that those who are brought into the ranks will enforce as well as comply with the laws they are sworn to uphold.⁸ The social contract between the police and the public has never changed, and it is within the purview of the background investigator’s responsibilities to see that the terms of that contract are strictly enforced.

Simply stated, the most profound impact a law enforcement manager can have on an agency is the hiring of an effective officer to add to the ranks.⁹ The success of a police officer is primarily based on their ability to effectively manage human relations issues, thus calling for police officers to be human relations specialists.¹⁰ This makes the responsibility to hire the best qualified applicants of the utmost importance to law enforcement administrators as well as those who have political control over their respective agencies. That responsibility requires an unwavering commitment to the legal, procedural, and ethical issues that transcend the hiring of the nation’s centurions. In contrast, bad politics leads to irreparable damage to a law enforcement agency’s ability to recruit, retain, and motivate the rank and file in proper fashion.¹¹

To provide some perspective to the issue, in 2004 there were more than 800,000 full-time sworn law enforcement officers working in the United States, the bulk of which, approximately 450,000, were employed in local police departments.¹² With respect to attrition rates, between 2002 and 2003, 34,474 officers were processed by local police departments: 28,791 at the entry level and 5,323 as lateral transfers.¹³ Over the last 20 years, a mass exodus has been observed in law enforcement officers migrating through lateral transfers, from large agencies to smaller ones.¹⁴ Reversing the trends of the previous era when smaller agency officers sought to gain the ability to be involved in more police work and promotional opportunities that larger agencies had come to be known for. However, since most police departments in the country employ 10 officers or less, the task of quickly replacing lost human resources becomes that much more critical even as the shift in employment demographics has tended to favor these smaller agencies.

While the overwhelming majority of law enforcement applicants are hired and have successful and lengthy service-based careers, the inevitable cracks always seem to be wide enough for a few of the unfit or corrupt to slip through. The effects of such errors polarize the ranks and create high levels of distrust and sometimes hostility from the public we are responsible to protect. The pressures created by short staffing, political influence, and the like can severely compromise the selection process of an organization. The return of political influence to the police realm can be accredited to the period of civil unrest during the 1960s that led to primary control of police agencies being placed under local political structures.¹⁵ Moves to centralize the political organization and structure of municipalities have yet to eliminate corruption in state and local governments wherein corruption is starkly characterized as an infestation.¹⁶ Political pressures often unduly and negatively impact the operational effectiveness of a law enforcement organization.¹⁷ Political pressures are also more intense in the elected ranks of law enforcement such as in the case of sheriff’s departments.¹⁸ The most disturbing factor is that the issues of the abuse of political power by those elected officials have been the subject of controversy for nearly two centuries. The only proven answer is to have formal legal controls in place to maintain the necessary and proper administration of any law enforcement process.¹⁹ This includes the pre-employment screening process.

Political trends are cyclical with respect to affirmative action initiatives in the United States.²⁰ Political influences due to attempts to meet affirmative action goals have led to several devastating scandals in law enforcement organizations throughout the country.²¹ These deficits in the hiring process lead to public outcries, external body oversight, and further constriction of the police chief’s ability to hire and manage their own staff. Politics will also enter the process when elected officials will consider themselves somehow qualified to question the veracity of the hiring practices and systems of the organization.²² The irony of it all exists in the theory that bureaucratic corruption can also be interpreted as a direct reflection of society’s morality.²³ Elected officials must be educated about the requirements for becoming a police officer in order to abate these types of issues.²⁴ Any type of reform must first emerge from changing the undue influence the political structure has over the police function in a free society.²⁵ A means v. ends analysis must not be maligned to justify these types of actions.²⁶ Political influence is truly the single most damaging bane of the law enforcement officer hiring process. Regardless of these pressures, law enforcement administrators must demonstrate a level of civic integrity that is beyond reproach.²⁷

Accountability is also felt at the highest levels of the organization when these hiring problems are uncovered.²⁸ Not only are police managers being held accountable, but also those key figures who work in the supportive human resource functions.²⁹ Worse yet, these likely episodic lapses may be perceived, whether real or imagined, as indicating patterns of flaws and abuses in the hiring process rather than as isolated incidents.³⁰ Managers will also privately extol situational justification for these ethical lapses.³¹ However, in the light of the public eye, they will deny such allegations in an attempt to insulate themselves from the decision that has gone wrong.

Compounded by nepotism and cronyism, which are somehow still tolerated by law enforcement and municipal administrators, but never by the American public, the problem grows ever worse with a real-time media that froth at the mouth for its next virtual meal. This plays out daily in the press reminiscent of a Greek tragedy where the histrionics of the media members act in the finest traditions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, using the virtual theater to bask in the paradoxical joy of watching others suffer. Yellow journalism is alive and well in the Internet and cable television conduits that are directly wired to all of our homes.

Research has consistently demonstrated that the press has a penchant for reporting decadent news events in lieu of other less controversial news events.³² And if law enforcement and municipal administrators are still holding on to the belief that this information will not be found by the media, they are dangerously deluding themselves.³³ From seeing the Pentagon Papers to the publishing of some 400,000 secret war documents on the Internet should put a damper on any hope of anything being secret anymore in this age of lightning fast information dissemination.³⁴ For example, one media investigation uncovered that a county child protective services agency had employed 68 CPS workers with criminal histories that ranged from drug possession, illegal weapon possession, domestic violence, prostitution, and repeatedly drunk driving charges.³⁵ Another media report revealed the hiring and promotion of a law enforcement officer who was terminated from his previous police employment. Despite the written objections of the background investigation unit command, the allusion was the hiring was done because of a relationship the applicant had with the chief executive and his administration.³⁶

A spate of legacy officers who were arrested for serious crimes in the Buffalo and Niagara region of New York State led to the media’s questioning of screening and hiring practices with the connotation of nepotism being the driver of the hiring rather than the qualifications and backgrounds of the applicants.³⁷ In yet another case dubbed the largest police corruption scandal ever uncovered and prosecuted in the state of New Jersey, officers were involved in bribery and extortion, admitting to beginning their criminal careers the moment they were sworn in.³⁸ The results of poor hiring practices have forced many law enforcement agencies to reevaluate their personnel selection and employment practices and standards.³⁹ How much change has been implemented is apparently a question for another day.

While we can lay blame on the waning quality of candidate pools and a host of other issues that would on the surface seem out of our control,⁴⁰ the reality is that many agency administrators bring these problems on themselves. And for a discipline that prides itself on doing what is right, how do we consistently make such monumental mistakes as these? For this statements’ seeming hyperbole, there is no exaggeration in the examples that will be presented throughout this text. One clearly poignant example emerges from the analysis of the pre-employment investigations of the officers involved in the Los Angeles Police Department Rampart Division scandal. The investigation revealed that four of the involved officers had highly questionable issues in their backgrounds indicating that they should have never been hired as police officers in the first place.⁴¹ Had they not been hired, at least the conduct attributed to their criminal actions under the color of law could have been avoided.

Corruption in local government that transcends law enforcement is seen as the most damaging influence to our strongly rooted American values.⁴² My charge is to use this text to move forward and create lasting organizational change that enhances your screening and selection processes. The use of these materials can help you avoid the situations that have plagued many agencies that have had a naïve or, worse yet, fully cognizant and palpable role in their faulty or illegal hiring processes.

OBJECTIVES OF THE PRE-EMPLOYMENT INVESTIGATION

Background investigations, like any organizational initiative, need a vision, mission, goals, and objectives to ensure the process is aligned with the overall organizational mission. The backgrou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• Chapter 1: Practical Implications of Pre-Employment Investigations
• Chapter 2: Pre-Employment Screening Process
• Chapter 3: Legal Issues in the Hiring Process
• Chapter 4: Medical and Psychological Standards
• Chapter 5: Informational Sources and the Final Investigative Package
• Chapter 6: The Past Predicting the Future of Pre-Employment Investigations
• Appendix A: Santa Barbara Application
• Appendix B: Alaska Department of Corrections
• Appendix C: Seattle Police Officer Qualifications
• Appendix D: Sample Policy
• Appendix E: Sample Conditional Offers of Employment
• Appendix F: Sample Personal History Statement (IPD)
• Appendix G: Sample Application Materials (APD)
• Appendix H: Sample Information Release and Liability Waivers
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index