A report from the Police Executive Research Forum on staffing shortages explains how departments are adapting to the challenges. Adjusting eligibility criteria is key. The idea, agencies have said, is to draw in the best candidates from a more diverse, less typical pool, rather than settle for “a lower-quality version of the traditional officer.”
In Montgomery County, this has already meant swapping out the physical fitness test — known to stymie otherwise qualified female applicants — for a medical examination. Elsewhere, as in Akron, Ohio, it has meant no longer banning officers from wearing beards. And elsewhere still, including in Fairfax County, it has meant ditching the prohibition on past marijuana use. Now, the Virginia locality considers “duration and frequency” of use, plus how long ago the candidate used.
The Montgomery County proposal is even more modest; the chief is asking only that any marijuana use more than one year before a recruit’s completing the police academy no longer be an automatic disqualifier. That would allow prospective officers to stop smoking weed right when they decide to try for the force — instead of punishing them for experimenting before they knew they wanted to be cops.
These changes make sense. Today, in places such as Maryland, smoking weed is no more a crime than sipping a beer. Excessive consumption of either THC or alcohol, to be sure, might be a reason someone ought not serve as a police officer. But to reject aspiring law enforcement agents because they ingested a legal substance once or twice is a good way to miss out on new talent — and furthers a stuffy image of police departments that discourages many from applying in the first place.
A Fairfax County major, speaking of that department’s marijuana policy, noted to the Police Executive Research Forum that “people with a little bit of life experience can be more successful” in their law enforcement roles than people with none. It might be riskier for police departments to fail to change their marijuana-use policies than to loosen them.
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