WHEN WILLIAM HAYDEN SCORED just 78.9 on e 1994 Nassau County, N.Y., police exam — score that placed him more than 8,000 names down the list and well out of contention to be hired — he knew something was fishy. A former New York City police officer and a fire marshal on Long Island, Hayden had studied hard for the test. The low score rankled him. Refusing to just let it go, he took out an ad and asked to hear from similarly disgruntled test- takers.
The response surprised even Hayden. One fellow candidate, who received a 67 on the exam, was not only a serving village police officer on Long Island (and therefore already a graduate of the Nassau Police Academy), but held a master’s degree and was working toward a law degree; another candidate, this one with an M.B.A., scored a 78; a Suffolk County probation officer with a master’s degree had an abysmal 64. Dozens of New York City police officers, many with distinguished service records in some of the city’s toughest precincts, were stunned to discover they were considered unqualified to patrol Nassau County.
What was worse was what Hayden was hearing about those who had done well on the test. They included, according to his sources, people with exceedingly poor academic and work records, as well as some who refused to be drug-tested. What had happened?
Hayden, as it turns out, was correct in his suspicion that something was wrong with the test. For as Linda Gottfredson, a University of Delaware education professor who analyzed the validation criteria that were used to grade the test, commented, the Nassau exam constitutes “a case study in racially gerrymandering the content of a test.”
Says Hayden, “What was done with this test is a disgrace. It’s a national scandal.” It certainly ought to be.
Nassau County, the suburb just east of New York City on Long Island, is one of the most desirable places in the world to be a police officer. Amidst its suburban sprawl of green lawns and quiet subdivisions, crime rates are extremely low. And police pay is extremely high, with the average Nassau officer taking home as much as $ 18,000 more per year than his counterpart in New York City. With working conditions like these, it is scarcely surprising that when the county offered its first police test in seven years in 1994, more than 32,000 hopefuls applied for perhaps 500 vacancies spread over the next four to six years.
But, as might have been guessed, there’s trouble in paradise. For nearly two decades before the 1994 exam, the county was embroiled in litigation with the U.S. Department of Justice, which had repeatedly accused Nassau of using a civil-service test biased in favor of white males. The county finally threw in the towel in 1990 and signed a consent decree with the Bush Justice Department. The county and the feds would jointly design a new, “job-related” police exam. Four years and $ 3 million later, this is the test that was administered to Hayden and the others.
No doubt the county figured that with the feds codesigning the test, there was no way they could object to the results. If so, the county hadn’t figured on the creativity of the quota police.
The test — which was supposed to eliminate “disparate impact” from the get- go — apparently failed in its purpose. So, to grasp the Holy Grail of an examination that passes equal percentages of whites and blacks, Nassau and the Justice Department manipulated the content of the test after it had been administered. The scoring process simply stripped the test of 16 of its 25 parts, the ones that (coincidentally) measured the ability to reason, think inferentially, and exercise judgment — just the qualities that are necessary to perform virtually any mid- to high-level job satisfactorily, and especially that of a police officer. The validators retained a token reading- comprehension section, but the bar was set so low — candidates had merely to be able to read as well as the worst 1 percent of incumbent police officers — as to be virtually meaningless.
Why was this done? The validation report itself, on page 86, states baldly that cognitive testing was rejected “in the interest of minimizing adverse impact.” In other words, “Blacks do not do as well as whites on such tests, so we’ll simply ignore the results.”
What was retained? A series of test sections that are said to measure personality and temperament along the lines of “openness to experience” and ” achievement motivation.” While the county has refused to divulge the test questions or the answer key, a flavor can be gleaned from these two questions, which were reproduced in the validation report: When you were in high school, were you a member of a sports team? A. Yes B. No. Which of the two statements is most like you — A or B? A: I’m always in a hurry at work to get things done. B: At work, I think of myself as part of a smooth-running machine.
After Gottfredson published her findings in the Wall Street Journal last October, then-assistant attorney general for civil rights Deval Patrick replied with an exceedingly tendentious letter in which he refused to rebut the professor’s arguments in detail. He blandly asserted, without offering evidence, that the Nassau test would “improve the police department.” Patrick then added the scurrilous (and totally false) charge that Gottfredson had a financial interest in discrediting the Nassau test.
The likely upshot? As Gottfredson herself noted, the consequences of dumbing-down police tests are already well known. Not only are many poorly qualified minorities likely to be hired, so will many poorly qualified whites. That is exactly what happened in New York City in the 1980s when, as a Koch- administration official famously blurted out, a “functional illiterate” could pass the police exam. This was the era of the hiring of Michael Dowd, the notorious cocaine-dealer cop, and Kevin Nannery, who led a rogue posse of officers dubbed “Nannery’s Raiders.” It was to prevent the hiring of the likes of Dowd and Nannery that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani moved to greatly toughen both the mental and physical standards that new city police officers are expected to meet. In other words, New York City is moving in the direction opposite from that of Nassau.
Not that the city is likely to get away with it for long, however. Remember those “100,000 new cops on the beat” that President Clinton bragged so tirelessly about during last year’s campaign? If the Nassau result is allowed to stand, it is safe to say that it will be used as a yardstick with which to beat local jurisdictions into what amounts to quota hiring, in exchange for the money to hire new police officers. Indeed, the Justice Department is already subjecting neighboring Suffolk County, N.Y., which just administered a police test of its own, to a “compliance review.”
Hayden and 67 co-plaintiffs, represented by the conservative Atlantic Legal Foundation, filed suit in federal district court March 24. In the meantime, however, Congress should investigate. If the bizarre goings-on in Nassau County are not challenged, then Congress will be buying quota hiring at the price of public safety.
John A. Barnes is an editorial writer for the New York Post.
