Candidates for Springfield police and
firefighter jobs will no longer be screened by Dr. Michael Campion,
the psychologist whose conservative views drew criticism from two
aldermen. Under a new contract awarded by City Council on Tuesday
night, future first-responder job applicants will be screened by
St. Louis psychologist Dr. Paul Detrick.
Detrick is director of Florissant
Psychological Services and does psychological evaluations for St.
Louis-area police departments.
Campion, chief executive officer of
Decatur-based Campion, Barrow & Associates, has been testing
Springfield police applicants since the 1990s. His objectivity was
questioned as early as 1999, when the Springfield branch of the
NAACP complained that Campion’s test discriminated against
females. The NAACP cited a half-dozen women who achieved high
scores on the police department’s written exam, only to be
disqualified by Campion.
In 2003, nine applicants to Springfield Fire
Department sued the city claiming they were unfairly disqualified
by either background checks or Campion’s psychological
evaluation. A judge dismissed the suit, ruling that the city could
rely on Campion’s test as long as it was applied uniformly.
Then, in August 2004, an article in Illinois Times revealed
that Campion leads a group of conservative activists called
Illinois Family Institute. The group advocates for religious
freedom and opposes abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage,
gambling, decriminalization of any illegal drugs, needle exchanges,
and civil rights protection for homosexuals.
Campion and his wife, Katherine, have served on
the board of directors for IFI since 1999, yet he made no mention of
his IFI ties in his résumé or on his firm’s Web
site.
For some city council members, this revelation
was the final straw. Ward 2 Ald. Frank McNeil says that, as soon as
the article appeared, he told Mayor Tim Davlin to find a new
psychologist for the police and fire departments.
“I went to Tim and said, ‘Hey,
this guy’s gotta go.’ ”McNeil recalls.
“He’s out of touch with the mainstream. He has an
absolute right to his conservative views, and we have an absolute
right to change reviewers.”
Ward 1 Ald. Frank Edwards — former chief
of the Springfield Fire Department — examined the
psychological tests taken by the nine plaintiffs who had sued the
city and couldn’t fathom Campion’s logic.
“The guy’s got no
consistency,” Edwards says. “The people I thought
would’ve been squashed, he passed. I’m just a novice
reading this, but if a guy had a beer, he was out.”
At the time, Campion told Illinois Times that he
didn’t list his IFI affiliation because it was irrelevant,
and that his personal beliefs didn’t influence his work.
“Municipalities hire me because of my qualifications and my
expertise, not because of what party I vote for.”
McNeil, however, didn’t believe Campion
could be objective.
“I think it’s hard to divorce
yourself from your beliefs. To me, that played into his
reviews,” McNeil says, “and I think that’s
unfortunate. I think a number of recruits may have been unfairly
excluded because of his subjective review.”
Research on Detrick found no political
affiliations. Aside from his professional work, he appears to enjoy
creative writing, and has short pieces about baseball and
hummingbirds stored online.
This article appears in May 19-25, 2005.
