No one person is held accountable when
a bad officer is hired in Milwaukee, because no one person is
responsible - or even sees the applicant's entire file. Instead, the
patchwork hiring system relies on a point scale designed to purge all
subjectivity from the process and keep the city out of court. The Fire
and Police Commission, which hires the city's officers, hasn't even
attempted to assess whether the new system - borne of 30 years of
litigation over racial bias - is effective. The commission didn't
orally interview applicants from 1997 through 1999. It didn't begin
giving officer candidates psychological tests until 2000, more than two
decades after they were adopted by many other departments, according to
experts on police hiring. Milwaukee continues to differ from other
departments because it doesn't require all applicants to be interviewed
by a psychologist, experts say. Not one of the five Milwaukee police
officers charged with felonies in the past month received a
psychological test and only one was even interviewed by the department
before going onto a hiring list. Both procedures are standard for
departments across the country and considered essential to weeding out
potential problem officers before they join the force. [more]
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