NO Hiring Criteria for Milwaukee Cops

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]