Untapped Sources for NYPD

The NYPD is in the peculiar position of having an admitted shortage of qualified Police Officer recruits but refusing to consider a potential solution from within its ranks: permitting School Safety Agents and Traffic Enforcement Agents to be promoted to be cops without having the required 60 college credits.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has adamantly refused to waive the college-credit requirement, which was first implemented during the Giuliani administration a dozen years ago. NYPD Chief of Personnel Rafael Pineiro told a City Council hearing last week that the department has "serious problems" recruiting but insisted it was necessary to bring new cops into the Police Academy with the equivalent of two years of college "so they can handle the academy material better and we can turn out a better police officer right off the bat."

The question prompted by that statement is, wouldn't someone who is already schooled in NYPD procedures and has working experience as a School Safety Agent or TEA be at least as well-equipped to "handle the academy material" as someone who may have no more life experience than what's imparted to him or her in college classrooms?

The NYPD is already waiving the college requirement for those with military service, so it's not an unshakeable tenet, since Mr. Kelly clearly believes that military training that candidates have previously received offsets the lack of academic credits. Shouldn't that apply equally to those the NYPD has trained itself?

We fail to see why those who have gained tenure in NYPD jobs that are lower in the pecking order would not be well-qualified to make the move up if they're capable of passing the Police Officer exam and dealing with the courses they receive in the Police Academy.

It's particularly hard to understand Commissioner Kelly's resistance at the same time that he is touting a 30-percent drop in school crime since the public schools were placed under the NYPD's jurisdiction. Those results would seem to warrant a good deal more confidence in School Safety Agents' ability to step up the career ladder than he is displaying.

Pete Vallone Jr., the head of the Council's Public Safety Committee, offered a potential compromise by saying that the department should consider giving recruits time to obtain the necessary college credits after they are hired as Police Officers. If implemented, with a time limit incorporated so that new cops would risk being fired or demoted if they didn't meet the college requirement within a few years, it would give the TEAs and School Agents - as well as members of the general public - a powerful incentive to further their educations.

Not so incidentally, by insisting on the importance of the college credits, Mr. Kelly is implicitly criticizing both the city and past and present administrations of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. If the garnering of those college credits was so vital to raising the quality of the police force, why has the city not upgraded salaries accordingly for those who have the credits, and why hasn't the PBA made that argument more strenuously in its past three arbitration cases?