Asking the Tough Question : Should Police Officers Be Periodically Evaluated Psychologically After They Are Hired?

Allegations this year that several police officers and sheriff’s deputies in San Diego County committed serious crimes, including murder, robbery and rape, raised the question of whether police officers should undergo periodic psychological testing. State law requires pre-employment psychological testing.

In the San Diego Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department, officers also are evaluated psychologically if they have been involved in a shooting or if there is strong behavioral evidence of psychological problems. In addition, the Sheriff’s Department requires that SWAT officers be evaluated annually.

Last week, San Diego County Sheriff Jim Roache sponsored a symposium on the subject with experts from around the state. After the symposium, The Times asked several panelists to summarize their thoughts on the question.

That’s not a good policy for a number of reasons.

One of the problems is what do you do with officers deemed not appropriate? Do you just send them back whence they came and create a “Fort Apache” situation? Or do you try to address their problems?

Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, the officers could say that the department has to reasonably accommodate their disability. What if they say they need a 9-to-5 desk job away from the public with weekends off to allow them to recover? And what do we do with false negatives, with people who the tests or clinical evaluations show have some pathology, but who have no behavior problems?

You also invite legal problems. An attorney representing someone rejected from the academy for psychological reasons can say, “Look, you have incumbent officers with worse problems. How can you exclude my client?” I am pushing the argument a little just to underline the point.

There is no shortcut to good supervision. And the authority and responsibility for doing that job should not be foisted off on psychologists.

No one disagrees with the fact that the public has the right to expect that law enforcement personnel are psychologically stable. But there has to be a reason to test officers. If problem behavior, on or off the job, is there, there is ample case law to allow supervisors to require fitness-for-duty evaluations. Or, why not use officers themselves to help control problem situations? An experiment with peer review was tried in Oakland, and it worked well.

But a psychological evaluation requirement for all officers is just full employment for attorneys and psychologists.