MANY NEW COPS HAVE USED DRUGS

Past Drug Use Does Not Disqualify You From a Police Job in Most Cities -- As
Long As You Never Get Caught

Nobody expects police departments to hire saints. The job is tough, and
recruits with street smarts often edge out those with unblemished resumes.
Even so, the confessions of Ellis ``Max'' Johnson II, one of Denver's newest
officers, were startling.

Under questioning from background investigators, Johnson admitted he had
used drugs on approximately 150 occasions - not just marijuana, but also
crack, LSD, speed, PCP, mescaline, Darvon, Valium.

Though personnel files are among the most closely guarded of police secrets,
a copy of Johnson's was leaked to the media after he entered the academy
last fall, sparking a fierce debate over the city's hiring practices.

Many here called him an embarrassment to the badge, even a threat to public
safety.

But Denver's Civil Service Commission, which sets the criteria for police
hiring, insisted that the 40-year-old former karate instructor had been
clean since 1987 and deserved a second chance.

The commission then disclosed an even bigger secret about police
recruitment, one that is true for many metropolitan departments rushing to
expand: Among new hires, previous drug use is the rule, not the exception.

The drugs Johnson sampled might have been extreme, but with their frankness
coaxed by a polygraph, 84 percent of Denver's police applicants - and at
least 65 percent of its recent hires - have acknowledged past
experimentation, civil service records show.

``Let's wake up,'' said Paul Torres, the commission's former executive
director. ``The days of Mayberry are long gone.''

In some cases, officers arrest people for acts they themselves have
committed - acts that, had they been detected, would have doomed a law
enforcement career.

If police are that permissive with their own, how can the law be so punitive
with others? Whose consumption gets treated as a malevolent scourge? Whose
gets written off as a youthful indiscretion?

``The way this country looks at drugs, you're a criminal only if you get
caught,'' said Joseph McNamara, a research fellow at Stanford University's
Hoover Institution and former police chief of San Jose, Calif., and Kansas
City, Mo.

``It's such an incredible hypocrisy.''

To gauge the limits of Denver's forbearance - and, by extension, the degree
to which those who enforce America's drug laws also have broken them - the
Los Angeles Times reviewed the employment applications of every officer
hired here in 1999.

In the ``Drug Use'' section, the responses were consistent: Of the city's 80
recruits last year, 52 admitted partaking.

Most of it was marijuana, usually small amounts, long ago. A puff in high
school. Three to five times with a college roommate.

Though a majority stopped at marijuana, 10 of the pot smokers went further.
One dropped acid. One ate psilocybin mushrooms. One tripped on ecstasy. A
former Army soldier admitted to smoking hashish oil in his barracks; he also
took amphetamines while on field exercises at Fort Bragg.

One officer, who had smoked pot ``about 25 times,'' admitted to buying
quarter-ounce baggies of weed on three occasions.

``This is a mistake I deeply regret making,'' he wrote.

Another, who was released to his parents after police stopped him with a
small amount of marijuana, chronicled about 75 drug experiences over two
decades - including speed, cocaine, LSD and Librium.

``If you polled the American public and asked the same kind of questions,
what answers do you think you would get - from lawyers or judges or doctors
or MBAs or CPAs or military people or even journalists?'' asked Kristopher
Colley, one of the Denver Civil Service Commission's five voting members.

With privacy laws varying from state to state, comparable data from other
law enforcement agencies could not be obtained. But interviews with more
than two dozen police officials and criminal justice experts indicate that
Denver's experience is repeated nationwide.

Denver's rules about a police recruit's history of drug use, now being
reviewed by a mayoral commission, had been among the most lenient - the only
requirement being a one-year wait, no matter the substance. Seattle is
nearly identical, except that it insists on a 10-year buffer for
hallucinogens.

Austin, Texas, is a mix of strict and forgiving: three years for marijuana
and five for narcotics. But applicants also can have sold pot - a
disqualifier almost everywhere else - just as long as they did it at least
10 years ago and never were arrested.

The fact is, with Denver's applicant pool dropping from about 10,000 in the
early 1990s to less than 2,500 today, drug use is not the only crime Denver
police are forced to forgive.

Among last year's recruits, four had been convicted of drunken driving,
three of vandalism, two of shoplifting and one of recklessly firing a BB
gun.

Another had been arrested for ``hitting a girl'' and was given a six- month
deferred judgment.

Many police management experts believe that recruits who have smoked pot can
just as easily turn out to be more effective officers - kinder, gentler,
savvier - or at least less likely to violate a drug suspect's civil rights.
Experimentation is never encouraged, but an otherwise talented applicant
with a history of drug use often gets the nod over a mediocre candidate,
even one who has never broken the law.

``What you really want is somebody who represents the norms of the
community,'' said Tony Narr, director of management education at the
Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum.

Popular culture might treat getting high with a wink and a nod, the stuff of
a Jay Leno monologue. Yet for those who get caught - and they, too,
represent a vast and expanding swath of society - redemption does not come
so easily.

Police made 1.5 million drug-related arrests in 1998; more than 680,000 were
for marijuana - and of those, 88 percent were for possession, not sales. In
many states, people caught with pot can lose their driver's license.
Students can be stripped of financial aid. Residents of public housing can
be evicted and immigrants, legal or not, deported.

The greater the quantity, the stiffer the sentence, with some first-time
offenders subjected to long mandatory terms, even life without parole. An
estimated 37,500 marijuana convicts are behind bars.

``It all comes down to luck,'' said Chuck Thomas, spokesman for the
Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington group that favors decriminalization.
``Who gets caught and who doesn't?'' ---