One strike, you're out
This may be a little hard to believe, so we'll go through it slowly to let it sink in. If you're a Boston police officer and you fail a drug test, you get to stay on the force.
That's right. If you test positive for cocaine, as 61 members of the department have since 1999, that's fine. Take a little time off, but keep your badge, keep your gun, keep your job.
If you test positive for heroin, exact same deal. Marijuana, ecstasy, whatever, no worries.
And that's not all. Those random tests aren't so random. As long as you haven't flunked one before, all tests are administered within a month of your birthday, so you pretty much know when it's coming.
Terrific, right? Yeah, right -- absolutely terrific.
There are drug abusers in any profession. There might even be more in law enforcement, given that its members are exposed day after day to the seamy side of life, facing dangers and pressures that civilians are hard pressed to understand. When they're constantly, delicately walking along that chalky line between right and wrong, it's oddly easy to slip over to the other side.
But there are a couple of absolute truths in terms of hiring and keeping public employees: Schoolteachers should never be sex offenders, for every obvious reason. And cops should never be drug abusers, for reasons that should be just as obvious, but apparently aren't to city officials.
So allow me to explain the most obvious reason of all. You don't want some doped-up moron, deluded by a badge, to have immediate access to a gun. As exhibit A, please refer to the affidavit in the July federal indictment of three Boston cops in the most significant corruption case in the department in at least 25 years.
In it, Officer Robert Pulido of the Boston police is recorded by a federal witness describing how he once grabbed a suspect by the hair and smashed his face against an automobile. ``I had just done a shot of [expletive] Winstral" steroids, Pulido said. ``I was ready. Boy, I was hyped."
Flip the page on the affidavit, to a section called ``Other Crimes," and there's this: ``During the course of the investigation, in other recorded conversations , Pulido admitted to smuggling illegal aliens into the United States for $5,000 per person, providing sensitive Boston Police Department information to one or more persons other than law enforcement officers, fixing tickets, trafficking in stolen electronics, and aiding and abetting loan sharking."
Other than that, he was a great cop. Actually, there's one more thing. In a hearing yesterday in federal court during which a video was played of Pulido and his cop cohorts celebrating their payout in a drug-smuggling operation, prosecutors said Pulido had previously failed a drug test. In other words, his alleged crime spree might have been prevented if he was fired when he should have been .
Pulido might be the poster child for a zero-tolerance policy, but there are other reasons to adopt one. For every cop on drugs, there's a dealer who sold the junk, and a dealer who sells to the law is a dealer with impunity. According to Globe police reporter Suzanne Smalley's excellent account last week, there were 75 cops who got second chances since 1999.
Maybe it's an old-fashioned concept, but police are supposed to be models of good behavior, people to look up to, the guards standing watch over the moral divide.
Most of them, nearly all of them, are exactly that, men and women who will chase a violent suspect down a city street when they could as easily look the other way, good, honest, hard-working people who can never get paid enough for the dangers inherent in the job.
Then some alleged drug abuser like Pulido comes along, takes advantage of a second chance when he should have been stripped of his badge, and casts suspicion over every member of the force.
This should be nonnegotiable: All cops who test positive for hard drugs get fired. Any other policy is a civic disgrace.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com. 
