The Hot Seat
Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
Chief Bill Harvey’s column from October 4th, and another one that I was editing tonight and that will go live next week, brought back memories of my encounters with “oral boards,” where those aspiring to be soldiers of the law get to be interrogated and make their case for why they are worthy of the badge. For the unfortunate person in the hot seat, it is a less than optimal experience.
I went to a lot of these, as I tested for maybe fifteen different agencies before I was hired. In the mid-seventies, the economy sucked and there were lots of men coming out of the post-Vietnam military and looking for cop jobs. Civil service looked pretty good when compared to the instability of the private sector.
The interview processes varied greatly. One of the early ones was with a larger sheriff’s office. The undersheriff interviewed me, one on one. In this instance, I use the term “interview” liberally, as this was more of a personal attack on my character, maturity, preparation and a questioning of whether I was deserving of being allowed to continue breathing the same air as him. I have since learned that this is called a “stress interview” where I was expected to stand my ground and defend myself, so as to demonstrate my self-esteem and tenacity. I did neither, and that was the end of that application process. About a year later, almost half the deputies there lost their jobs in a restructuring fiasco, so maybe it was for the best.
The more politically correct entities conducted carefully scripted interviews, where each person read questions from a sheet of paper, and no follow-up questions were asked or allowed. Responses were recorded by a single secretary. There was no feedback from the panel, so the applicant that took their cues from the psych interview in Alice’s Restaurant
“Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.“
would have appeared to have done as well as Joe Friday. Somebody must have done better than me, because I didn’t get that job, either. The guy that did get it was the brother-in-law of one of the agency’s lieutenants, so maybe I should have picked my friends better.
The panel where I did pass the gauntlet was fairly informal. Rather than sit on a chair in front of a long table opposite the panel members, we were all seated around a small table. All of the panel members were cops from that agency - one officer, one sergeant, one lieutenant. It appeared that they could ask anything they wanted. I can’t remember a word I said.
Some years later, while reviewing my personnel file, I saw the notes that panel had made. I had passed the interview by about three points. The sergeant’s comments were very middle of the road. He didn’t much care whether I got hired or not. The officer’s take was much more critical. She took me as naïve (good call there), self-righteous (not so much, but not entirely inaccurate), and indecisive. She gave me a miserably low score. The lieutenant was the one that saved me, and I have to believe that he read the sheets from the other two before he wrote his own, because his score just offset the officer’s enough that I got by. He gave me big time points for high ethical and moral standards, which was kind of a curious take, as those values were not held in especially high esteem at that agency. I often wondered if he ever came to regret that action, or if he even remembered it.
A few years later, I was sitting on those same oral boards. I was fairly proud of my decisions. The applicants to whom I had given the thumbs up usually turned out to be pretty good cops. I was instrumental in getting one guy refused, only to have him re-apply the next year and get hired. He flunked out of field training, got hired by a neighboring agency, and got canned from there, too. He had come from the second-largest police department in the country. I wonder if he ever went back there?
The question that was asked on every panel, whether I was sitting in front of, behind, or at the table, was “Why do you want to be a police officer?” I was frequently surprised at the number of applicants that had apparently never contemplated being asked this question, and were stuck for an answer. The stock response was “I want to help people,” which came back to haunt them after we asked them to explain how putting someone in jail was helping them. But there was one applicant that had a truly great answer to this question, and was probably one of the most forthright responses, as well: “Because it looks like fun!” When I heard that, I looked to the panel members to my left and right, and we all smiled, because we knew that it was fun, and despite all the headaches that came with the job, that was fundamentally why we kept doing it.
I miss that fun, but at least I got to have the experience for a while. I’m hoping, if you’re a cop now, that it’s still fun for you. If you’re someone who wants to be a cop, and you’re good enough, I wish you a lot of fun, too.
Tomorrow, I’m off to the annual meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Boston, and I will hope to have daily reports to you, all posted here. All told, I’d rather still be having fun, but maybe it’s someone else’s turn now.
Great article!!