From: "Clayton E. Cramer" <clayton_cramer@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: Capital Shooting - Analysis and Speculation
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 14:13:59 -0700

Bubba wrote:

> On 28 Jul 1998 23:58:07 -0400, tline@iglou.com (Tom Line) wrote:
>
> *2. Why don't they rotate real D.C. street cops who have experience
> *   dealing with non-tourists before apathy sets in? This way,
> *   guard duty would be relaxing temporary duty for experienced cops,
> *   but not long enough for their street smarts to shut-down which would
> *   be inevitable dealing with tourists for months at a time.
>
>         My understanding is that the D.C. police force is a joke....at one time I
> heard that if you were breathing, you could qualify for the force, and that they
> were allowing people in with a prior criminal past.

I presume that they've cleaned it up since then, but the Wall Street Journal
had an article some years ago about how a check of the DC PD's officers
found that almost 2% had prior FELONY convictions, including murder
and drug trafficking.  This was because they got desparate at one point
for officers and skipped the time consuming background check while
hiring.  In addition, literacy is apparently not a given with DC PD.  The
article quoted prosecutors as saying that many cases could not be
pursued because crime reports were often unusuable; large numbers of
their patrol officers were effectively illiterate.  Under Mayor Barry's
tenure, a number of rules were relaxed to make sure that they could
staff the department with residents of DC.  Eventually, the police
academy stopped requiring passing grades on exams because so few
could pass them.