By SHAILA K. DEWAN, The New York Times
In the past few years, Police Department recruiters have discovered that waiving the $35 fee and accepting applications over the Internet sharply drive up the number of people applying to become police officers. At the same time, though, the percentage of applicants who actually show up to take the police test plummets, to about a quarter of all who apply from about half.
The department is trying to turn that slump around for the next test, in February.
“We’re following up with applicants, we’re making a lot of phone calls,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a recent interview. “We’ve done a lot of outreach.”
To try to get a better count in advance - and perhaps prod more applicants to show up - the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which administers the test, is requiring applicants to reserve a seat for the test. Cards bearing reservation instructions were mailed on Dec. 22, so it is too early to gauge the response, said Warner Johnston, a spokesman for Martha K. Hirst, the commissioner of administrative services.
The new effort to get more people to take the exam comes as a spike in retirements seems to be tapering off. By mid-November in 2002, 2,300 officers, eligible for a pension after 20 years, had retired that year. Many who had earned considerable amounts of overtime pay after Sept. 11, 2001, said they were taking advantage of the rule that calculates pensions based on pay for the final year of a person’s employment.
By the closing days of 2003, 1,898 had retired, Chief Michael R. Collins, a spokesman for the department, said early this week. He said the department would not provide its projections for attrition in 2004.
But after last Tuesday, when 1,300 cadets graduated from the Police Academy in a ceremony held at Madison Square Garden, the department was about 800 people short of the budgeted number of noncivilian personnel: 37,210.
During his tenure, Commissioner Kelly has made recruitment a priority, hiring a full-time outside consultant and intensifying campaigns at elite colleges, military bases and places of worship in minority neighborhoods. It was under his watch that the exam fee was first waived, a move that he says encourages a diverse applicant pool.
The department tried reinstating the fee last June, but only 3,323 people signed up to take the test, the lowest number since at least 1986. For February’s exam, the fee has been waived once more, and 31,770 have applied.
More than half of those, 19,464, signed up online. Of those, Chief Collins said, 15,000 are state residents, and 186 are nonresidents of the United States.
The department has initiated a program called Operation Show Up, which consists of e-mailing and calling applicants to answer their questions and gauge their interest, Chief Collins said.
Historically, about 75 percent of those taking the exam pass. Of those, one in 10 is found suitable to hire.
Mr. Kelly said he did not see a correlation between the economy and the number of applicants. “We’ve never really had a problem,” he said in a recent interview, although in early 2002 he expressed disappointment when fewer than 7,000 people showed up to take the exam.
If anything had an effect, Mr. Kelly said, it was 9/11 and the subsequent change in the public’s perception of police officers. Ground zero was prominently featured in an inspirational, slow-motion video shown at Tuesday’s graduation, which also included images of the World Economic Forum, two detectives who died in the line of duty in March, and a tiger - presumably the one that the department’s Emergency Services Unit found in a Harlem housing project and shot with tranquilizer darts in October.
Since 9/11, Commissioner Kelly said, the average age and education level of applicants has increased. “There is this sense that people want to be involved in the fray,” he said.
Tuesday’s graduating class was described in a news release as “one of the more ethnically diverse in the history of the Police Department.” It is roughly 25 percent Hispanic, 16 percent black and 7 percent “Asian and other.” The department is now about 21 percent Hispanic, 15 percent black and 3 percent “Asian and other.” The percentage of women in the department is the same as in the current class, 16 percent.