Background investigations of applicants cause Portland police jobs to remain vacant

By Mariah Summers
The Portland Tribune

Want to be a cop in Portland? What you’ll need is patience.

Just ask 23-year-old Jessica Brainard, who applied to be a Portland cop in July 2007 and took her test in October. She was not hired until earlier this month.

Compared with nine other police departments researched by the Portland Tribune, including West Coast cities and similar-size agencies elsewhere, the Portland Police Bureau’s hiring process ranks third to last in speed.

What requires eight to 10 months in Portland takes only three to six months in Seattle and just three to five weeks in Beaverton, according to interviews by the Tribune. Only Cincinnati and Sacramento, Calif., are slower.

Portland’s slow process is under increased scrutiny these days. City Commissioner Randy Leonard, who has been conducting a study of the police bureau at the request of Mayor-elect Sam Adams, says the delay is the reason the bureau has been unable to fill a high number of officer vacancies. He blames the unfilled vacancies for excessive overtime costs, slower response times and demoralized, stressed-out cops.

“Once we do decide we like someone it takes an unusually long bureaucratic process to hire them,” he said. “We need to hire them right away. A young person needs to pay the rent: We have to hire them.”

Assistant Police Chief Brian Martinek admitted that the delay has been a problem and said, “We’re taking a lot of steps to change it.” But he noted that agencies nationwide are scrambling to find cops.

“We’ve been working on this since Day One when I got here,” said Martinek, who has overseen the bureau’s personnel office for the past two years. He added that the bureau needs time to properly screen candidates, saying, “None of us wants to lower quality.”

The bureau is trying to fill 38 officer vacancies. In addition, the City Council has earmarked funding for 27 additional officers to help reduce the bureau’s spending on overtime.

However, the bureau has been struggling to keep its staffing shortage from getting worse. That’s because officers who came on board during a hiring “bubble” in the 1980s have begun retiring. According to the bureau, it loses an average of 45 officers a year to retirement.

Martinek says the bureau has been rapidly adapting to a changing world. He said that the background investigation policies he inherited upon joining the bureau in 2006 were written at a time when the bureau was seeing thousands of applicants show up for each test. Now the number is in the lower hundreds.

“The entire hiring process, including the background investigation, was designed to eliminate,” Martinek said. “Now we are facing a different challenge.”

For applicants, a written test is just the first in a series of exams that includes an oral interview, physical ability test, psychological exam and a background investigation.
In 2007, Martinek commissioned a report from Charlie Makinney, a longtime bureau manager. It faulted Portland’s background investigation process, saying it is “seriously outdated and actually encourages subjectivity.”

Makinney called the hiring process “time-consuming, resource-intensive, overly subjective, unnecessarily reliant on individual investigators’ judgment and interpretation of facts.”

Since the report came out, Martinek said a number of changes have been made to speed up the process, increase the number of candidates and make the background investigation easier to pass. For instance:

• The bureau now administers its written exam three to four times each year instead of twice.

• Candidates now provide eight references instead of the previous 12

• The bureau is looking less critically at illegal drug use in an applicant’s distant past.


Despite the lowered background investigation standards, “This will still be a process ensuring quality management of applicants,” Martinek said.

But Leonard says the process remains too long and the background investigations too stringent.

He told the Portland Tribune about a recent police candidate who was turned down by the bureau and was later hired by the U.S. Secret Service.

“We need people with good judgment and life experiences, and we’re letting people go who are getting hired elsewhere,” Leonard said. “Once we get people in the front door we’re saying we don’t want them.”

The bureau’s hiring statistics show that only 30 percent of candidates pass the background investigation. The entire process is so selective that of the 889 applicants who took written tests in February, the bureau ended up hiring only 39 entry-level officers.

And even with the recent changes, background investigations still are averaging four to six months to complete. That’s longer than the entire hiring process in several comparable cities.

Martinek attributes this mostly to the fact that Oregon law bans the use of polygraph tests on applicants. An effort to change that last year was blocked by police officer unions working with the American Civil Liberties Union, citing the devices’ unreliability.

Of the seven cities in other states contacted by the Portland Tribune, all employ polygraphs to speed up background investigations.“It’s most important,” said Tom Waller, a Cincinnati sergeant who does background investigations. “Without the polygraph you have no way to check people as to whether they’re telling you the truth.”

‘Waiting is never fun’
But being unable to use polygraphs may not fully explain the difference between Portland and other cities’ hiring times. Other large agencies have gone further than Portland to attract candidates and process them quickly.

Seattle, for example, tests candidates at least once a month.

Meanwhile, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina employs a retired police captain to administer its written test at 65 military bases across the country each year, said recruiting Sgt. Mark Davis.

Davis said candidates are not willing to wait around like they used to. He thinks cutting the hiring time is crucial for modern police departments. His department completes the hiring process in just three to four months.

“If you don’t act quickly, good candidates will go elsewhere,” he said.

In Portland, the police bureau has offered positions to some candidates only to find they’ve already taken jobs elsewhere. However, officials said that does not happen as frequently as it did in the past.

Martinek said Portland has other hiring obstacles besides not using a polygraph test. Other states’ civil service laws allow a more streamlined process; also, he says the city’s human resources bureau has set restrictions that affect the bureau’s ability to hire as aggressively as it would like.

Still, he hopes to cut the hiring time to six months, and remains optimistic about staffing levels at the bureau.

“I want to make it clear we are a big agency, and this is a big challenge,” he said. “I don’t think we’re doing things as well as we can. But we’re trying very hard to do better.”

Brainard, the new Portland hire, is attending the police academy in Salem. A Portland native, she had been looking for local police jobs, and considered working for Gresham and Beaverton.

She decided early in the process that she was willing to wait for a response from the Portland bureau. But she still found the delay discouraging.

“It was really tough at times,” she said. “Waiting is never fun.”

Posted by Pebi Services President Tyra Hearns