Excessive use of alcohol among police has long been recognized as a problem, but drug abuse has received considerably less attention. Random, mandatory drug testing of active duty police officers and candidates desiring to be such are relatively new programs.

“Contact with crime, criminals, the ‘grey zones’ of normative behavior, discretion and officers’ substantial autonomy offer ever-present opportunities for corruption in police work,” says Professor Tom Mieczkowski, director of graduate studies in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida.

Mieczkowski recently authored a paper (published in the “Journal of Forensic Clinical Medicine,” No. 11, 2004) investigating police drug use, and describing the results of hair analysis and urinalysis drug testing on police officers and persons aspiring to be police officers.

“Problems of corruption related to drug abuse has in recent years become a more prominent and pronounced concern of police agencies,” Mieczkowski says.

While traditional forms of police corruption, including behaviors such as accepting bribes, protecting illegal activities for profit, or receiving kickbacks for tolerance of unlawful activities are believed to have stabilized or even decreased in the United States over the past 100 years, drug-related corruption is generally acknowledged to be on the rise, he says.

Police officers who begin as recreational users are at risk for entering what is known as a “user driven cycle” of corrupt behavior. This usually begins when a drug-using officer ceases to buy drugs from suppliers, instead confiscating drugs either from apprehended dealers or evidence lockers where drugs are held, both of which can be done with little risk, Mieczkowski says.

The motivation for seizing drugs is obvious. First, stolen drugs don’t cost anything. Second, officers who attempt to buy drugs on the street run the risk of identification and possible blackmail. It is therefore often functionally safer for officers to seize drugs encountered during arrests for personal use.

A major federal 1998 report (GAO/GGD-98-11) on drug-related police corruption found on-duty officers engaged in serious criminal activities, including conducting unconstitutional searches and seizures, stealing drug money and/or drugs from drug dealers, selling stolen drugs, protecting drug operations, providing false testimony, and submitting false crime reports.

Get with the program In response to police drug use, agencies are developing methods to screen recruits for histories of drug use and subject applicants, trainees, and sworn officers to chemical drug testing.

Most police departments in the country already have drug-testing policies, although the most common application of drug testing as it is now practiced is in the testing of job applicants. A 1999 survey for the Bureau of Justice Statistics on drug screening policies and practices of 651 U.S. police departments showed the majority (86.6 percent) tested all applicants.

No such trend appears to have developed to screen active duty officers. “Only a limited number of major metropolitan police and sheriff’s departments have instituted random drug screening,” says Scott Tiedemann, a partner at Liebert Cassidy Whitmore Law Firm in Los Angeles. “I believe law enforcement executives are interested in random testing programs, but most agencies do not have such programs in place.”

Drugs in the police workplace not only compromise police and citizen safety, but also inevitably raise integrity issues. Random drug screening is viewed as a deterrent to drug use.

However, drug screening raises privacy concerns as well as Fourth Amendment issues. “Although the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld drug testing requirements in certain circumstances, employers must be very careful to establish testing procedures which are minimally intrusive,” Tiedemann says. Employers also must be aware that, depending upon the labor laws in their respective jurisdictions, they may be required to negotiate with employee representatives regarding the imposition of drug testing requirements, he says. Furthermore, any law enforcement agency seeking to implement drug testing requirements should seek legal advice prior to doing so.

Tiedemann says once a drug testing program is implemented, employees who will conduct the testing should be trained on an ongoing basis in both the technical and legal aspects of the policy. “A positive drug test which is obtained in violation of the policy or the law may not be admissible evidence and therefore useless to the employer in disciplinary proceedings,” he says.

Union stance The International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), although they have not taken an official position, does lean toward drug screening. “We feel that drug testing is necessary,” says IUPA spokesperson Rich Roberts. “It’s a matter of officer safety, if nothing else. You don’t want on-duty officers impaired, putting themselves and other officers at risk.”

Roberts says the majority of police departments have some form of screening in place and those that don’t are likely taking a hard look at it. If not handled properly, however, controversy can result.

IUPA’s main concern is due process. Roberts says any drug testing program must guarantee due process for the officers involved. Screening programs should be negotiated with command level and agreed on mutually.

One key factor to consider when implementing a screening process is a level playing field. “In one Midwest town the city council ruled that all civic employees be subject to random mandatory drug testing, but they voted to exempt themselves,” Roberts says. “If it’s blanket random testing for all employees, then it should mean everyone who draws a check.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) reported in January that the union for Toronto’s police officers says it will fight plans to impose drug testing and other forms of screening of officers engaged in duties like monitoring the narcotics trade and prostitution. The call for screening officers follows a number of internal scandals on the force, among them the filing of 40 criminal charges including perjury, theft and extortion last year against six Toronto drug squad officers.

David Wilson, head of the Toronto Police Association, says his members will fight the plan. “We are completely against this … there is no way to understate this … and we want to make it clear to everyone,” he told CBC News.

Besides infringing on officers’ basic rights, he says screening won’t expose corruption. Instead, he says, senior officers should be paying more attention to subordinates who appear likely to run into trouble. “What you’re really talking about is supervisory issues. It’s up to the supervisors to monitor their people and be aware of what’s going on in their lives,” Wilson says.

Julian Fantino, the Toronto Police’s outgoing chief, told CBC he’s committed to seeing screening implemented. Working in drug enforcement and similar areas, he says, are “high-risk positions that find our people in very vulnerable places.” Screening, is “our effort to ensure they are protected.” Similar measures have been taken recently by Los Angeles and New York police agencies.

Some question whether a police department should require a drug test even after a shooting incident. The Labor Relations Information System (LRIS ) has examined drug testing after deadly force. According to the LRIS Web site, it doesn’t know of any case law on the issue, nor does it know of anyone who thinks a post-shooting drug test is a good idea.

The reason commonly advanced for a post-shooting drug test is that a clean drug test will be useful in the event a civil action is filed against the department by the victims or their heirs. But, the LRIS doubts a clean test would be admissible as evidence because a clean test would not be relevant to any issue concerning the propriety of the shooting.

On the other hand, a positive drug test would be admissible, meaning the only evidence a department is creating by having post-shooting drug tests is evidence that could harm it in any subsequence civil litigation.

“Worse, police officers consume some [legitimate] pharmaceuticals that have a psychoactive impact, pharmaceuticals that might well show up on a drug test. The presence of antihistamines, anti-depressants, and a variety of other medicines could easily become fodder for a plaintiff’s lawyer suing a department over a deadly force incident,” the LRIS says.

Test in peace

Mieczkowski’s study compares the results of drug screening done by urinalysis and hair analysis between 1985 and 1999 by a major Eastern police department. Drug testing data is analyzed for civilians applying for police work, officers in training who were tested at the end of a two-year training period, and sworn officers in the field. The paper compares the two screening technologies and assesses their efficacy for detection of drug use.

While most agencies still use urinalysis as the drug test of choice, hair analysis is fast becoming the Swiss Army Knife of screening in large departments.

“Urine testing is very good for short-term detection, with a time window of roughly 8 to 72 hours for rapidly excreted drugs (cocaine, heroin, amphetamine) and a week or two for slowly excreted drugs like cannabinoids and PCP,” Mieczkowski says.

Because of the rapid turnover of urine in the body, urinalysis does not do well at detecting long-term patterns of abuse. Those being sampled may anticipate testing and merely abstain for several days prior to sampling.

Hair analysis, however, provides a better alternative to detection of long-term drug use and is more difficult to evade.

Hair assays are useful three to five days following ingestion, since the hair must emerge above the epidermis in order to be cut. (Samples are not pulled from the scalp.)

“Normally, unless or until the hair is removed from the body or chemically dissolved and destroyed, the drug can be detected even several months after ingestion,” Mieczkowski says.

The urinalysis findings show that of the three categories (police applicants, in-training officers and working officers) applicants have drug-positive urinalyses about 2.8 times the rate of working police officers and at 16 times the rate for probationary officers. This pattern apparently holds true regardless of the size of the tested pool of personnel. Probationary officers in every case have the lowest rates of positive urine test results, applicants have the highest and working officers occupy the middle ground.

The mean rate for hair analysis drug positive specimens was found to be 1.36 times that for urinalysis. In this case, the applicant pool tested two to three times higher than the probationary officers. Sworn officers were not tested with hair analysis. Mieczkowski concludes that applicants for policing positions test positive at much higher rates than do working police officers. He also notes new officers who are on a probationary or trial status test positive at the lowest rates of all groups and that hair analysis, which examines a wider window of retrospection than does urinalysis, shows a higher rate of positive outcomes.

Douglas Page is a science and technology writer living in Pine Mountain, California.