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Coming Under Fire
In Fredericksburg, Va., contractors undergo DynCorp's firearms training in preparation to train police in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(Photos By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
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U.S. officials are beginning to turn their eyes to DynCorp and companies like it and consider whether the job of constituting a foreign police force is really one for a hired hand.
DynCorp says that many concerns about its performance are related to the officers recruited for the Iraqi or Afghan police forces, which is not the company's responsibility.
"We don't control the political situation, the political loyalties of the people," said spokesman Greg Lagana. The company has hired public relations firm Qorvis Communications to help deal with the attention.
According to Perito, one of the knocks on DynCorp, which recruits online and at police conventions and depends heavily on word-of-mouth referrals, has always been the wide variety in the quality of people it hires to be trainers.
Last year, for example, a DynCorp trainer was called back to the United States from Iraq after being accused of destroying evidence while he was a Vermont state trooper.
Having the Justice Department manage the program, or using an auxiliary force of police officers who work directly for the government, would be a "more professional and proficient approach," Perito said.
DynCorp defends its recruitment process. Sixty percent of applicants are selected, the company says, and some of those fail to make it through either the two weeks of training or the psychological testing.
The company also attempts to weed out debt-ridden applicants who may be motivated too much by the salary, which can top $100,000 a year.
The salary reflects the danger. The company says 21 trainers have been killed in the two countries since the program began in 2003. Although the company tries to hire law enforcement officers and others who understand dangerous situations, said recruiting manager Lynn Holland, the reality in Iraq or Afghanistan is outside the experience of almost any American police officer.
"You really don't understand this job unless you can see it, because it's so foreign to anything we do in law enforcement," Holland said.
Last December, the Iraq Study Group expressed concern about how the program is run, and in January the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found that oversight was lax, leading to unnecessary costs.
The special inspector found that the lone officer supervising the Iraq program, who had been overseeing DynCorp's police contracts for more than a decade, had not received proper training.
