Legal pot a challenge to police recruiting

MOSES LAKE — In the years since Washington voters legalized marijuana consumption for adults over 21, law enforcement had found itself facing a brand-new recruiting issue: What to do with young adults who aspire to careers as police officers and sheriff’s deputies but who have also partaken of the state’s newest legal agricultural product?

“Kids coming out of high school now want to experiment, and sometimes they make bad decisions,” said Grant County Sheriff Tom Jones. “When I talk to high school classes, I emphasize you have to make good decisions and think about the future.”

“It’s okay to have fun,” Jones continued. “But you need to mind your P’s and Q’s.”

Jones said that legal marijuana is not posing a problem for law enforcement recruiting. People are “hungry for work,” he explained, and the Grant County Sheriff’s Department has plenty of applicants for each open position.

“The problems are with people not making it through the background process,” he said.

Jones said that roughly 55-60 percent of all new applicants for Grant County Sheriff positions fail the background process “for one thing or another.”

The screening process includes not just drug testing, but a mandatory polygraph test during which Jones said many applicants “self-disclose” previous drug use.

Prior to the legalization of recreational marijuana in 2012, the Grant County Sheriff’s Department could require new recruits to be drug-free for five years. Now, however, Jones says his department has shortened that time to one year, in line with the Washington State Patrol.

“One applicant came in and filled out that he had used marijuana four months previously. He asked if I could waive it. Yes, I could, but I usually don’t,” Jones said.

“I told him he was more than welcome to come back in a year,” he added.

While the State Patrol is having the same difficulties that many agencies across the country are having recruiting new police officers, Moore said this fall’s class of 60 recruits was the largest it had ever been.

“The agency goal is to have another 60 recruits hired for this spring,” Moore wrote in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald. “Previous classes have averaged around 35 recruits.”

Moses Lake Police Chief Kevin Fuhr, who joined the department recently after serving as chief in Rathdrum, Idaho, said that while legal marijuana hasn’t yet posed any problems to recruitment in Moses Lake, it is something departments in Idaho had to face as well.

“It’s a big issue,” Fuhr said. “A lot of candidates for positions in Idaho come from the Spokane area, and it’s an issue with recruits who can pass drug tests.”

Fuhr added that legalized marijuana is going to pose problems to any number of professions that insist upon drug-free work places.

Dave Ruffin, who teaches criminal justice at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center, said he reminds his students — nearly all of whom are high school aged — that the change in the marijuana laws has changed nothing for them.

“There is no legal marijuana for them,” Ruffin said. “It’s still illegal [for anyone under 21], and not just for drugs, but for the bad choices that you sometimes make when under the influence.”

Ruffin says he tells students despite what the law states now about marijuana or alcohol use, law enforcement is a profession “that can be pickier” about the personal and private habits of the people it hires.

“Alcohol is legal too,” he said. “Do we want to hire police officers who have a problem with alcohol? No.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.