Gloria Campisi reports for the Philadelphia Daily News. Excerpt:
The Philadelphia Police Department is scrapping the polygraph test as a hiring tool.
Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson said yesterday more intensive background checks would replace the lie detector test, which has been in use here for more than 20 years.
The action was hailed by a police union official who called the lie tests as reliable as “tarot cards and ouija boards.”
Johnson said Philadelphia was the only large city still using the controversial tests, required for admission to the Police Academy.
Once in the academy, some recruits who passed the lie tests have been determined to have been involved in illegal activities that would bar them from the force, he said.
In a lawsuit filed in the late 1980s challenging the tests, American Civil Liberties Union official Barry Steinhardt said people turned down for the police force because of negative polygraph results numbered “in the hundreds, and probably more than 1,000.”
The test reportedly relies heavily on questions about drug or alcohol use and personal matters.
Rich Costello, president of Lodge 5 of the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union, hailed Johnson’s action, calling the tests “inherently unreliable.”
“An awful lot of people are not officers today [because of] this toy,” Costello said.
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson has taken a courageous step in scrapping polygraph screening. Unfortunately, Philadelphia was not the only large city still using polygraph screening. For example, Los Angeles adopted it in February, 2001, and since that time, about half of those applicants “tested” have “failed.”