Can biased cops be weeded out before being hired? A tool aims to find out

A group of retired FBI agents led by a former Las Vegas agent thinks so, and has developed and patented Justice Is Equal, a background screening-tool initiative they hope that someday will be used by law enforcement agencies to prevent the hiring of police officers with biases.

“It’s one more tool in the toolbox for law enforcement agencies to utilize when they’re screening potential applicants and candidates for police officer positions,” said James Stern, a former FBI supervisory special agent from 1982 through 2007 who had assignments in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Washington D.C. and Las Vegas.

Stern, who more recently headed security at Wynn Resorts, partnered with three former FBI colleagues to develop the initiative and is in the process of marketing it to municipalities and their police agencies across the country.

The objective of Justice Is Equal is to discover, before officers are hired, whether they could harbor biases against individuals due to race, gender, age, sexual orientation or disability.

“Is this going to solve racism in America? Absolutely not,” Stern said in a recent interview. “Racism in America will be around long after you and I are gone. But is it an initiative that will help screen potential bad apples before they get in and put on a uniform and are issued a badge and a gun? Yes.”

Costly settlements

Police agencies across the United States have experienced the costly toll of hiring officers who have demonstrated prejudicial conduct. Stern said settlements frequently exceed $1 million per incident — amounts that ultimately fall to taxpayers of their respective communities.

Between 2011 and 2015, Baltimore taxpayers paid more than $5.5 million to settle police brutality claims. The city of Chicago paid more than $521 million during a 10-year period between 2004 and 2014. The city of New York paid more than $348 million between 2006 and 2011 and the city of Los Angeles paid more than $101 million between 2002 and 2011, Stern said.

After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, organizations including Black Lives Matter issued calls for defunding police agencies and restricting access to law-enforcement resources.

“While statistics show that a very small number of rogue police officers is disproportionately responsible for most blatant and criminal misconduct, the foundational structure of our criminal justice system has nevertheless come under threat from a number of hastily conceived, ill-informed demands for drastic reforms,” Stern said.

Stern set out to modify the hiring process to prevent some applicants from ever wearing a badge.

Collaborators and advisers

Stern, an FBI polygraph examiner from 1998 to 2004 who conducted more than 600 polygraph examinations, collaborated with retired FBI supervisory special agent Robert Moore, who worked in the FBI’s Seattle and San Francisco divisions and was a polygraph examiner from 1996 to 2002, and retired FBI supervisory special agent Gregory Gilmartin, who was with the Honolulu and Las Vegas divisions from June 1989 to May 2012 and was a polygraph examiner from 1994 to 2004.

The three agents worked with four senior advisers, retired special agents Norman Embry, whose last FBI assignment was in Los Angeles; and Samantha Bieber, a senior U.S. government law enforcement adviser to international and domestic police and emergency services departments, and a military veteran with the 101st Airborne Division with Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2006 to 2008.

Retired Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Stan Embry, who spent more than 25 years with the force, believes Justice Is Equal will be able to make a difference — in the right hands.

Embry said he thinks the screening of prospective police officers should be conducted by independent entities and not police departments to avoid the appearance of any favoritism in the process.

“When you have an independent company that comes in then it lends more of an air of, ‘OK, this is legitimate. This is not being influenced in any way by the internal dynamics of a law enforcement agency,’” he said in an interview. “Yes, you’ve got to have an outside agency or company do this type of screening.”

Embry, who is Black, said he has experienced prejudicial treatment within his own department. As a rookie cop, he partnered with a white officer who told him he simply didn’t like Black people.

“As we worked together and he had to rely on me, he started to open up a little about his feelings toward African Americans. He said he and his brother were jumped by some African-American boys when they were younger.”

Would the partner have been hired if Justice Is Equal was in place?

“If this were in place, I think it would send a message to officers actually out there working in the field,” he said. “People have become very suspicious of law enforcement being a good-old-boy network that looks out for their own.”

Business plan disseminated

While Stern couldn’t disclose specific details about how Justice Is Equal polygraphs work, he said developing a specific line of questioning in a polygraph exam should root out applicants who shouldn’t be considered for police department work.

He drafted a 25-page business plan that he disseminated to prospective clients and is awaiting responses from departments.

“Typically when you’re applying to be a police officer there are qualifications for the job, you pass a written test and an oral exam before a board and they’ll do a background investigation,” Stern said. “Some police departments utilize a polygraph, some don’t. Did you lie on the investigation? Did you ever use illegal drugs? Have you ever committed serious crimes? In the federal arena, everybody uses a polygraph and they do those questions plus they polygraph for national security, terrorism and counterintelligence.”

Steve Grammas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, said he didn’t think Stern’s program would be necessary at the Metropolitan Police Department because it already uses a polygraph test in their screening.

“A lot of the questioning came from the psychological (evaluation) which was about 500 questions and they followed up with a polygraph,” Grammas said. “There are some bias questions, racial questions and integrity questions, a lot of things in there. In our world at Metro, where we already have a polygraph, I don’t see the need for someone else with newer technology to do the same thing.”

Grammas also acknowledged that “nothing is going to be 100 percent foolproof.”

But Metro Deputy Chief Kelly McMahill said the department will have a look at the Justice Is Equal program.

She said that when the department began making reforms in 2012, it took a look at hiring standards.

“For many years, we’ve always had questions that address things like bias, in particular racial bias, sexual harassment, discrimination, hostile work environment. We also always had questions that discuss an expression of superiority. Those were standard,” McMahill said. “This year, right around the time George Floyd happened, I went back in and made our folks take another look at the types of questions that we were asking and so in the world we had this real political divide and we were seeing a different type of extremism that we’d seen before.”

Superiority complex

McMahill said the line of questioning comes up in psychological exams as well as in a formal polygraph test. Weeding out those with a superiority complex is part of the goal and the line of questioning is completely legal, she said.

“It’s something we’ve looked at since 2012,” said McMahill, who oversees human resources responsibilities for Metro. “We’ve really taken a hard look at it and this year, we revamped it even more to try to cover a broader category than we’ve ever had in the hiring process of those corrections officers, police officers and even on the civilian side as well.”

McMahill said rooting out bad prospective officers involves a review of an applicant’s social media accounts to see if there are any comments or photographs indicating problem areas.

“If we go through people’s social media and we see pictures of them holding a confederate flag, that’s easy, that’s a no-brainer,” she said. “We go in, we ask really tough questions and more often than not, their beliefs do not align with ours and we cut them out of our hiring process.”

Young applicants

But it’s getting more difficult now with older background investigators interviewing applicants in their early 20s, which is why new training and new methods such as a more specific polygraph test are being considered.

“I do want them to be on the lookout for tattoos, maybe some signs on social media that are newer,” she said. “My background investigators are now in their 40s and some of them may be in their 50s. Are we missing something generationally that we would not know about? We’re always looking for new training and new guidance, especially when there’s a gap in generations between the kids we’re hiring now that are 21, 22, 23, and our background investigators and myself.”

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.