By JOSEPH KELLARD
Ryan McKenna, 26, was among the applicants waiting on long lines in the school's hallways for the 9 a.m. exam. McKenna, who manages a paintball business in his hometown of Bellmore, admitted that he was edgy about taking his eighth police exam. “This will probably be my last test,” he said. “I don't think there's any other test I can take unless I go to Connecticut or Westchester.”
Going into each exam, McKenna said, he feels that everything is on the line. “This is a lifetime job and if you get it, you're set,” he said . “If you don't score well, you might as well kiss it goodbye.”
McKenna said he averages in the low 90s, a score that may still be insufficient to make him the first in his family to earn a police badge. He wants to protect and serve, but there are other things pulling him to the police force. “Honestly, the benefits,” he said. “It's the one job [in which] you really don't have to worry about how the economy is going.”
LBPD officers start at $38,000 a year, and the job includes benefits such as the option to retire after 20 years. What is difficult for McKenna, he said, is waiting to find out whether he has made the eligibility list to be hired, a process complicated by hiring practices at other departments, including Nassau and Suffolk counties, that remain uncertain as budget cuts loom large. “So that's why I keep taking as many tests as I can, because you never know who's going to hire first,” he said.
Time was also a concern for another early bird, T.A. Brown, a 34-year-old emergency medical technician from Levittown who, like McKenna, has taken a number of police exams this year. “I'm used to it by now, but it's still a little nerve-racking because it's my one and only shot,” Brown said before the test. “The cutoff age is 35.”
The exam presents a crime scenario and a series of multiple-choice questions, testing an applicant's memory for detail as well as reading comprehension. Those who pass may be hired from an eligibility list within four years.
Brown has long wanted to become a cop, but she had other commitments to tend to first. Now that her daughter has grown, and after Brown experienced what she called “unexpected, life-changing occurrences,” she decided to finally pursue police work. “I want to be someone my daughter can be proud of, in a sense different than just being a good mom,” she said.
This year, the Long Beach Civil Service Commission reduced the exam's minimum age requirement from 18 to 17 to continue expanding its pool of applicants. In the upstairs lobby, they handed police officers their I.D.’s and were thumb-printed. Department openings are based on vacancies, future retirements and the city's fiscal stability, and applicants were vying for an estimated 10 positions, according to Lt. Bruce Meyer, the LBPD's head of recruitment.
Police officials attributed this year’s crowd of applicants primarily to the department's focus on increasing its racial and gender diversity. After Thomas Sofield Sr. was appointed police commissioner in 2004, the then new Republican majority on the City Council told the department that it must make diversity a major goal. The city was under increasing pressure, particularly from the minority-heavy North Park neighborhood, because it had not had any black officers on its force in decades.
That December, the LBPD ordered a new exam, and opened the application process to non-Long Beach residents. At the same time, to raise its standards, it required that applicants have 60 college credits or two years of military service.
“We made a promise to reflect the city of Long Beach, because there was a lot of tension and really bad blood between the people in the North Park area and the police,” said the city’s Civil Service commissioner, Jim Hennessy, who was then City Council president.
But the 2004 exam yielded mixed results. While the LBPD hired its first Asian-American officer and a Hispanic woman, no African-Americans made the cut. The department ordered yet another exam the following year, and Meyer created a recruitment unit. Eleven of the 860 applicants in 2005 became officers, including two blacks, two Hispanics, three women and one Asian-American.
Hennessy explained that diversification is restricted by Civil Service law, which requires applicants to score in the mid- to high 90s on the exam and do well on a psychological evaluation and a physical.
Long Island ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — which has traditionally worked with minority clients in search of housing, staged a protest in Long Beach in October 2006. The organization claimed that the 80-member police department had fallen short of its goal to reflect the city's population, which is roughly 65 percent white, 9 percent Latino, 3 percent African-American and 1 percent Asian-American. Representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice later visited the city to inquire about what the LBPD was doing to hire minorities.
According to Meyer, since Sofield's appointment, the department has hired 17 officers, and 12 percent are African-American, 12 percent are Hispanic, 17 percent female and 6 percent are Asian-American. In his recruitment efforts this year, Meyer posted fliers announcing the exam in police departments from Manhattan to Suffolk County, targeting areas where he was most likely to find minority recruits.
Applicant Tashema Mayo, 27, didn't come across those fliers, but she routinely calls Civil Service commissions to find out when exams are being given. Mayo, who has an associate's degree in criminal justice, was a corrections officer at a prison in North Carolina before she moved home to Hempstead six months ago. Last month she took the state corrections officer’s exam, and on Saturday she took her first shot at the LBPD exam.
“This is a nice area to work in,” she said of Long Beach. “There's not much crime here, and it's got good pay, too.”
Responding to critics who say the department has lowered its standards by making race and gender a focus, Hennessy said he believes they are important components in modern community policing, and pointed to the college requirements as evidence that the department has in fact raised its standards. He said that an unintended consequence of having a large pool of applicants is that even if they score 95 or 96, they may not get called.
“So we're getting the cream of the crop, because we're always going to be pooling from that top bracket of people,” Hennessy said. “We're getting people who have college degrees and who don't have to go to the police academy for six months because they’re already police officers somewhere else. So they can go right out on the street.”
Meyer said that many police officers, particularly from the Nassau County and New York City P.D.’s, have taken the Long Beach exam in recent years. One of them was Joe Zaratan, 29, of Long Beach, who is an NYPD officer in Jackson Heights, Queens. Zaratan said the short commute was a big reason why he was taking his second crack at the Long Beach exam last Saturday.
“It's pretty routine,” he said of the test. “All I can do is just hope for the best.”
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.
Photos by Arthur Findlay/Herald
