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75 Officers Failed City Drug Tests
Pubdate: Sun, 30 Jul 2006
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2006 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact: http://www.boston.com/globe/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Suzanne Smalley, Globe Staff
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Test)
75 OFFICERS FAILED CITY DRUG TESTS
Cocaine Use Most Prevalent, Raising Concern
Since Boston police started annual drug testing in 1999, 75 officers
have failed the tests, and 26 of them flunked a second test and were
fired, newly released statistics show.
Acting Police Commissioner Albert Goslin said an additional 20 of the
officers who tested positive left the department on their own, which
he said is because they could not handle the frequent follow-up checks.
Of the 75 officers, 61 tested positive for cocaine, 14 for marijuana,
two for ecstasy, and one for heroin, according to the figures,
obtained by the Globe through a public records request. (Some
officers had more than one drug in their system).
Some specialists and department observers said they were alarmed by
the number of officers testing positive for a "hard" drug such as
cocaine and questioned the department's policy that allows an officer
to remain on the force after a positive drug test. An officer is not
fired until a second positive test.
"It seems like it's a chronic problem," said Darnell A. Williams,
president and CEO of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts. "Here
we're trying to deal with the guns and the drugs on the street level,
but we have a more strident problem inside the department when we
have that many people testing positive for drugs, especially cocaine."
The department's drug testing policy is already under scrutiny, after
reports that the alleged ringleader in a corruption case tested
positive for cocaine in 1999, yet kept his job under the rules that
call only for suspensions and treatment even for positive tests for
drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
Unlike Boston, the New York and Los Angeles police departments
dismiss officers after a first positive drug test.
Eugene O'Donnell, a former New York City police officer who is now a
professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
said he believes the Boston police may have an unusually high number
of hard-drug users because of its two-strikes policy. The New York
Police Department has a very low drug test failure rate because of
its zero tolerance policy, he said.
"Once you establish that people are fired, it does change the
complexion," he said. "If an agency says you can use drugs . . . it
stands to reason you're going to have a higher rate of people using drugs."
While 75 Boston officers failed drug tests out of a total force of
about 2,000 sworn officers since 1999, at the much larger Los Angeles
Police Department, 14 officers have flunked the drug test since March
2000. It employs 9,354 officers, of whom about 3,000 are subjected to
random urine tests each year.
A spokeswoman for the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration said that of the 150,000 federal employees
who took random drug tests in 2004, 0.4 percent failed .
In 1999, when the most Boston officers failed drug tests, the rate
was more than double that, about 1.1 percent. Goslin said the testing
policy and treatment have cut the number of positive tests since then.
Boston police test for cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, PCP, and
marijuana -- the standard list recommended by the federal government
for workplace testing. Officers can also be tested for other drugs
with reasonable suspicion.
Officers are tested before they join the force, again while on
probationary duty, then annually within 30 days of their birthday.
They are also tested if they get promoted or assigned to a special
unit such as narcotics or organized crime.
If they test positive for any drug, officers receive a 45-day unpaid
suspension and must get treatment. Once they return to duty, they are
subject to random testing for three years, in addition to regular testing.
Goslin said it is not fair to compare the department to other law
enforcement agencies, which he said typically use a less
sophisticated urinalysis test that does not detect drugs taken more
than a few days before the test.
He said the Boston police method of testing officers' hair is more
reliable and can catch drug use dating back three months. "I would
expect our rate to be higher," Goslin said in an interview.
Los Angeles police test urine for drugs, and New York police test hair.
Goslin also said that Boston police test every officer annually,
which is more regularly than many police departments, where a smaller
number of officers are tested at random each year. Therefore, he
said, all officers aren't screened consistently.
The annual testing began in 1999 after years of negotiating with the
city's powerful police unions, which had objected to the tests. In
exchange for salary and benefit increases, the unions agreed to a
system that gives officers warning by scheduling tests within 30 days
of their birthday.
The city's hair-testing method has also been disputed.
Fifty-seven percent of officers who failed an initial drug test since
1999 were African-American, which troubles critics who believe blacks
are more likely to get false positive results because of the texture
of their hair. Last year, seven former Boston police officers -- all
African-Americans who lost their jobs because of what they say were
false positives -- sued the department, alleging the hair test is
biased. The suit is pending .
Goslin defended the test. "The science is very good and can withstand
any level of scrutiny," he said.
Goslin said he is not surprised that the vast majority of officers
who failed the tests had used cocaine. "In the '60s it would be
marijuana; now it seems to be cocaine," he said.
But Mark A. de Bernardo, a labor lawyer in Virginia who is executive
director of the Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace, said he is
startled by the number of Boston officers who used cocaine. He said
that while no one tracks national numbers on law enforcement officers
who test positive for drugs, it is unusual for so many of the
positive results to be for cocaine.
"In typical drug testing, the number of marijuana positives is going
to be three, four, five times the number of cocaine positives," he
said. "That's alarming that cocaine would seem to be the drug of
choice for the drug abusers in the Boston Police Department."
He said the number of drug-using officers might be higher than what
the testing shows because of the predictability of Boston's annual testing.
"Anybody who fails a drug test when they know a year advance within
30 days of when it's going to be . . . is a person who I consider to
be an addict," he said. "I'd assume that this is just a percentage of
those that actually engage in actual drug use because it's not true
random testing."
He also said that by giving officers a second chance, Boston police
are straying from the standard set by most other employees where
workers are responsible for public safety.
However, the Urban League's Williams said he believes the department
is right to give officers a second chance, especially since in many
cases it seems to work. Of the 75 officers who tested positive since
1999, only about a third failed a second test.
Goslin said after the initial wave of positive tests in 1999, the
policy has successfully cut drug use. "People took the policy
seriously and went to get help on their own, and that caused the
numbers to drop drastically," he said. "And it dropped every year the
policy has been in existence."
Francie Latour of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman