Wondering why cops get off easy on drug testing

Monday, April 17, 2006

H e's one of those ground-level guys who can interpret street-top hieroglyphics, the spray-painted lines used to map the underworld for construction workers.

"Blue's water. Green's for sewer. Orange is communication -- Qwest, cable, all that. Yellow, that's us -- gas."

His name is Jim Walker, but friends and co-workers at Northwest Natural Gas know him as J.W. On this day, like most workdays for the past 17 years, he's working outdoors, the cold spring rain misting his glasses as he and a partner measure the depth of gas lines along Gloucester Street in Gladstone.

Walker, 58, starts his workday at 7 a.m. in a NW Natural locker room. Some mornings, before the crews head out, a mobile van pulls up outside and a supervisor announces which workers have been selected for random drug testing.

Walker was one of dozens of people who called or e-mailed me after last week's column about the lack of random drug testing at the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.

Most of the callers were guys like Walker, men who'd spent their careers driving big trucks, operating heavy equipment or laying utility lines. All of them were upset that all police officers aren't being held to the same drug-testing standards.

"I understand why I'm tested," said Walker. "I work with gas, I'm operating equipment. I drive 30,000-pound trucks. But how is it possible that policemen are not tested?"

The courts have supported random testing of workers when public safety outweighs the worker's Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

But when it comes to law enforcement, the rulings have been mixed depending on the specific nature of the police work. The courts have held that police work varies too much for all cops to meet the required public safety standard. And even when cops do meet the standard, any random drug-testing policy must be established as part of the police union's collective bargaining agreement.

But it can be done. In cop shops from New York to Oregon, police unions have signed off on random drug-testing for all their members.