Question

Starting in 1989, the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., changed its recruiting and hiring practices. First, the Department began requiring that all new officers be residents of the District of Columbia. Second, it abandoned the criminal background checks of recruits that it had previously used and that were standard in law enforcement. Third, the Department lowered the difficulty of its written screening exam so that—as one training instructor at the police academy stated—“a third-grader could pass.” By 1993, it became apparent that performance in the Department had declined. Many of the new officers lacked the competence to complete arrest reports or to testify as witnesses in court. As a consequence, thousands of cases, including many murder cases, were thrown out of court. Corruption among new officers became so widespread that the FBI formed its own special internal unit to monitor and control the problem in the Department. Morale in the Department plummeted, prompting a huge wave of retirements and resignations of disillusioned experienced officers in 1996. Throughout the 1990s, the Washington D.C. crime rate was among the worst in the country.

     This series of events illustrates that:

    

    

   

the recruiting and hiring standards used by an organization have both direct and indirect effects on the overall performance of the organization.

some of the more “intangible” commonsense criteria (e.g., integrity of character) that should be used as selection criteria cannot be validated.

it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between an organization’s selection criteria and the aggregate performance of individuals within the organization.

from a strategic HR perspective (i.e., from the perspective of fulfilling the organizational mission), police departments in general should decrease the size of their recruiting pool and use more restrictive hiring criteria.

b and d

Answer 1

from a strategic HR perspective (i.e., from the perspective of fulfilling the organizational mission), police departments in general should decrease the size of their recruiting pool and use more restrictive hiring criteria

In case of recruiting for a security and law protector institute like the police department, the hiring criteria should be quite high and effective because they look after the protection of law and therefore they need to have certain quality aspects or else they may not work out for the system and the performance may decline in the process.