Aced the PQE

I received a fairly thick stack of papers from the City of Los Angeles. On the top of this stack of paperwork was a letter, which said:

Law Enforcement Employment – Personal Qualifications Essay

You have passed the Personal Qualifications Essay (PQE) portion of the examination and were placed on the hiring list according to your score of 90 (this score includes military credit if you submitted proof of Honorable Discharge).

We schedule people from this list for further processing according to score and hiring needs. If you have not already been scheduled for further processing, you will be notified should your score qualify you in the future.

The next sheet of paper had appointment dates and times for my next two steps in the application process: an initial background interview, and the Physical Abilities Test (PAT).

There were several forms to be filled out, including one 22-page monster called the Personal History Form for Public Safety Officer Applicants (PHF). They want to know where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked, how much money you make, how much money you owe, who your friends are, what kind of drugs you’ve used and so on.

It would seem that I will be in sunny Los Angeles again soon. Until then, I have my hands full with forms.

The Personal Qualifications Essay

The Personal Qualifications Essay (PQE) was basically three essay questions, which needed to be completed within 90 minutes. I was one of about 15 or so people who showed up to the testing center to take the PQE only. Most of the applicants in attendance were there to take both the multiple-choice written test, as well as the PQE.

Back when I first went to Los Angeles to take the written test, the application process was slightly different. After the written test, there used to be some sort of interview, to be conducted (I believe) by an off-duty LAPD detective. Since the mayor is intent on hiring over a thousand new officers by the end of fiscal year 2007, the city felt that it could not afford to pay those detectives overtime for conducting those interviews. At least that’s what I’ve heard through the grape vine.

I was one of the first ones to arrive at the testing site. A burly LA police officer walked by and spoke to a few of us briefly. He recalled the time when he, too, was an applicant. He told us, “The only advice I can give you is to use common sense.”

Judging from the reactions of many of my fellow test takers, the officer’s advice seemed to go right over their heads. I took his advice to mean, “Use common sense when answering any and all questions they (those affiliated with the LAPD testing procedures) throw your way.”

When it was time to sit down and take the PQE, I did just that. The last essay question was something along the lines of, “Describe something that you have done that you regret. What did you learn from your experience? How have you changed since then?”

While I will not discuss my answer here, suffice it to say that I didn’t discuss the time, as a 19-year-old punk kid, where I consumed a fifth of vodka, beat the crap out of some guy whom I felt “disrespected” me at a nightclub and proceeded to drive into the horizon drunk and a skunk.

It seemed like the common sense thing to do was to not write about such a thing. In any case, we’ll see in about two or three weeks whether my prose was good enough for the City of Los Angeles.