POLICE AND DRUG TESTING

Increasing The Public's Confidence In Police Requires Using A Wide Variety Of Strategies

It's in the name of credibility with the public that city leaders in Schenectady have been pushing for four years for random drug testing of police officers. Police officials in Troy, and elsewhere, have considered it as well.

The goal -- that the cops on the beat are clean -- is not an objectionable one, certainly. It's the obstacles and the detours that make the issue so much more complicated.

It will be hard, for one thing, to get random testing on the books anywhere police officers are represented by a union. In Schenectady, officers can't even be tested for drugs if there's good reason to suspect that they're using them. Same goes in Troy. In both cities, the police unions aren't about to agree to random testing without getting contractual concessions in return.

As our reporter Brendan Lyons detailed in a recent story, few police forces in the state have random drug testing, in fact. One that does is the State Police, where less than 1 percent of officers have tested positive.

A more sensible course for city officials, then, would be to get testing for probable cause into the police contracts. That's the standard in Albany, for instance, and with the Albany County Sheriff's Department.

Anywhere drug testing of the police is an issue, though, it's fair to ask why. There's quite a leap, certainly, from a police officer clean from drugs to a police officer clean in other regards. Often that's the more pressing issue.

In Schenectady, there's reason to focus largely on the latter. It's true the indictments returned by an ongoing federal grand jury investigation of the city's police department accuse two officers, Michael Siler and Richard Barnett, of shaking down a pedestrian and then seizing and distributing crack cocaine that had been in his possession. There has been no allegation that they used drugs.

It's true, as well that in Troy, an officer reached a plea-bargain agreement with the county district attorney's office in another drug shakedown case.

But if the larger goal in Schenectady is to increase public confidence in the police, allegations of corruption and brutality will have to be addressed, too.

Officers Siler and Barnett, remember, are accused in a separate civil case in federal court of apprehending a resident of the city's Hamilton Hill section, driving him across city lines, beating him, and leaving him on a remote and darkened road without his shoes.

A more enlightened police department would be more than a drug-free one. It would be one with much broader recruitment and training. It would be one with more oversight, where not even the proverbial "handful'' of bad cops tarnished the image of the entire department. It would operate in an environment where citizens of all races could come forward more comfortably if they have complaints and suspect misconduct by the police.

And it would come after the same police union that is powerful enough to stop drug testing is made properly accountable, not only to its members but also to the people it and the police force itself are supposed to serve.

More public credibility? Yes, we're all for it.