Pubdate: Fri, 22 Jul 2016
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2016 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Kevin Rector

DAVIS: POT RULE HINDERS HIRING

Police Commissioner Says Bar on Past Marijuana Use Limits Recruiting Efforts

Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis wants to relax a hiring 
policy for police officers in Maryland that disqualifies applicants 
for past marijuana use, saying it is "fundamentally inconsistent with 
where we are as a society" and hurts local hiring efforts.

Davis will lead a committee to review the current standard of the 
Maryland Police Training Commission, which sets hiring policy for law 
enforcement in the state. Police applicants are disqualified from 
becoming officers if they have used marijuana more than 20 times in 
their lives or five times since turning 21 years old.

The policy has been in place since the 1970s, when the nation had 
declared war on drugs. In recent years, Maryland and other states 
have decriminalized marijuana possession, and some have allowed its use.

"I don't want to hire altar boys to be police officers, necessarily," 
Davis told The Baltimore Sun's editorial board Thursday. "I want 
people of good character, of good moral character, but I want people 
who have lived a life just like everybody else - a life not unlike 
the lives of the people who they are going to be interacting with every day."

Davis wants the state to maintain a prohibition on marijuana use in 
the three years before application but eliminate the Kevin Davis 
automatic disqualification for use before then, according to a letter 
he sent the training commission. He said police chiefs could still 
consider marijuana use from years ago in hiring decisions, and 
individual departments can set more strict guidelines.

Davis said past marijuana use is "the No. 1 disqualifier for police 
applicants in Baltimore" at a time when the department is looking to 
diversify and bring more city residents into its ranks. He said that 
"we need our police departments to reflect communities."

Applicants must prove they are drug-free through urinalysis. Their 
past use of the drug, which would not show up in tests, is expected 
to be shared with recruiting officers during an interview.

The Baltimore commissioner believes the standard is too strict and 
too rigid in its application because police commanders have no 
discretion to make exceptions even if a recruit only engaged in 
youthful experimentation or abandoned smoking marijuana years ago.

"I can't apply discretion if you say you've smoked marijuana over the 
magic number of times," Davis said.

"We can hold all the job fairs we want in West Baltimore and in East 
Baltimore, and we can get people to the table to take the test. But 
when they go to the prescreening interview, and they say they've 
smoked marijuana above the threshold that was established back in the 
'70s, they're permanently disqualified. And that's a source of 
frustration for me."

Davis said he is "really looking forward to getting some 
forward-looking police chiefs in the room with me to have this 
discussion." The review is not looking at other disqualifying 
factors, such as criminal records.

Others questioned whether relaxing drug standards for police 
applicants is a good idea.

Mike Gimbel, former director of the Baltimore County Office of 
Substance Abuse and now a drug consultant who works with college 
athletes and private businesses, said the marijuana being used today 
is much more potent than it was decades ago. And the scientific 
community hasn't been able to keep up in terms of understanding the 
effects, he said.

"Baby boomers are running the country, and baby boomers are leading 
the movement to liberalize or legalize marijuana, and they think it's 
the same pot they smoked in 1969. And it's not that way," he said.

Chuck Canterbury, president of the national Fraternal Order of Police 
union, said his organization has not taken a stance on the revision 
of drug use policies but members "generally oppose reductions of 
educational standards or previous criminal history standards" and 
"would like to see more in-depth medical evaluation before they jump 
on the bandwagon of reducing standards" governing past drug use.

Usually when standards are diminished, so is the caliber of officers, 
Canterbury said.

"With the current atmosphere around policing, we don't know that we 
can tolerate any more reductions in standards," he said. "It's just 
not good for the profession."

The conversation comes amid a much broader dialogue surrounding law 
enforcement in the United States following the fatal shootings of 
black men by police in cities across the country and the recent 
killing of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La.

Many in law enforcement, including Canterbury, believe that the 
scrutiny has contributed to recruiting problems for police 
departments - which has prompted some to revisit drug policies and 
other hiring standards.

"Obviously, what's driving this type of change is the fact that 
recruiting and retention is so difficult," Canterbury said.

Baltimore has been at the center of the debate for more than a year, 
since the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray from injuries suffered in 
police custody caused widespread protests against police brutality. 
Gray's funeral was followed by rioting, looting and arson.

But in Baltimore, police officials said recruiting problems stem more 
from longstanding difficulties in finding qualified applicants than a 
reticence among potential applicants because of recent events, officials said.

When Maj. Jim Handley was put in charge of reinvigorating recruitment 
for the department in January, he sought to identify hurdles. He 
expected to find that recruiting had been stymied by Gray's death and 
the police-involved deaths of other young black men like Michael 
Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

"Of course we hear about the 'Freddie Gray Effect,' the 'Ferguson 
Effect,' " Handley said in a recent interview, "so I really wanted to 
examine that." But what he found surprised him. "Anecdotally, people 
thought that our applications would fall off after the unrest. We 
found that absolutely not to be true," Handley said. "It's 
essentially the same."

As of April 30, the department had 401 applicants in 2016 - a 6 
percent increase over the same period last year, before the unrest, 
Handley said. Of those applicants, 167 were black, representing a 29 
percent increase in black applicants over 2015. There were 252 
minority applicants, including women - a 41percent increase over 
2015. Handley called that "a very good sign." But for years, only 
about 5 percent to 7 percent of applicants have been qualified after 
background checks, Handley said, and that rate has remained steady 
over the last year.

Davis said marijuana is overwhelmingly the culprit for 
disqualifications, and it's "time for a change."

The department has 2,300 officers, down from more than 3,000 in past 
years. The force declined, in part because of a deal with the police 
union to reduce the number of officers in exchange for pay increases, 
but there are also hundreds of vacancies the department is trying to fill.

Police departments across the country have confronted changing 
attitudes around marijuana for decades. Places like Colorado and 
Washington have legalized marijuana, and other states, including 
Maryland, have pushed forward with decriminalization and medical 
marijuana licensing.

Many states consider past marijuana use when screening police 
applicants, but standards vary - and are changing. Some states 
require two years of marijuana-free living, others longer.

Some agencies are even considering doing away with their policies.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency bars those who have experimented 
with or used narcotics from becoming agents but may make exceptions 
"for applicants who admit to limited youthful and experimental use of 
marijuana."

The FBI bars the hiring of employees who have used marijuana in the 
past three years, but that policy has been questioned.

Gimbel said that if police do decide to relax standards on past 
marijuana use, the change should come with increased preemployment 
and in-service testing of officers, as well as enhanced psychological 
evaluations.

Especially for police, even slight impairments to hand-eye 
coordination or the ability to make quick decisions could have major 
consequences, he said.

"If you do have a person who has been smoking pot on a fairly recent 
basis, especially what I'm calling the 'new pot,' you might see some 
slowness in the ability to make quick decisions," Gimbel said.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom