By Amanda Pinto, Register Staff
08/23/2008
MADISON — When police Officer Patricia Smith is sworn in Monday, she will be the first new hire to go through a revised process — one that increases the Board of Police Commissioner’s control over screening and hiring candidates.
The new process, officials said, will help restore integrity to a department that has been beset by scandal as eight officers have been fired, suspended or charged in recent months.
The change, initially made by the board and further enhanced by acting Police Chief Robert Nolan, allows commissioners to see a candidate’s background check, psychologist’s report and polygraph test — the prospective hire’s entire file — at the time they do their interview, board Chairman Emile Geisenheimer said.
For years, they never saw these reports, he said.
Future officers, who Geisenheimer said will likely be hired soon, will see their application, testing and ranking process conducted not out of the Police Department, but from the town’s Human Resources Department.
In the past, police handled “just about everything” when it came to new hires, Nolan said.
For years, Geisenheimer said, candidates came before commissioners after they took a written test and an officer panel comprised of high-ranking police officers from outside of Madison.
The commissioners’ interview amounted to 20 percent of the process that determined whether the officer would be hired, Geisenheimer said.
“Even though the commission had the statutory authority to hire the officers, in fact we didn’t have much to say about it because of the way the process worked,” he said. “It was pretty much stacked on the weights of these other two tests.”
The process was further flawed because the commissioners’ interview was not only blind, but stilted, with commissioners only permitted to ask each candidate one question each from a prepared list, Geisenheimer said.
Once a commissioner selected a question, he had to use that same question for all candidates, Geisenheimer said.
“It was a process that didn’t lend itself, in my opinion, to properly screening these people,” he said.
The board revised the questioning process, making it less rigid, but were still allowing conditional offers to be made without seeing background checks until Nolan took charge.
First Selectman Al Goldberg said moving the application process over to human resources is a good step toward ensuring objectivity, and gathering more “integrated information” about their candidacy.
“This pretty much eliminates any chance of picking and choosing people for any reasons other than being totally qualified to do the job,” Nolan said.
As a whole, the new process is a better screening mechanism and helps make sure the department hires the best candidates, Nolan said.
“We want to make sure we have people of high integrity, and of course high ability as well, but there’s a big focus on the integrity of the candidates,” Geisenheimer said. “We want people who have very strong ethics and no black marks in their backgrounds.”
Amanda Pinto can be reached at apinto@nhregister.com or 789-5734.
© New Haven Register 2008