By Marlene Braga

Ask college students of color these days about their career plans and they’ll talk excitedly about a possible future in business, the Internet or engineering. Not many, however, appear eager to join New York City’s troubled Police Department, which has been jolted by brutality charges in recent years

"I want a better paying job," said Jules Bottex, a 28-year-old Haitian-American student graduating this month with a dual degree in finance and economics from City University of New York. As a police officer, he said, "you really can’t earn that much money unless it’s overtime."

But pay, which starts at $34,000 a year and can rise to $60,000 after five years, is only part of the problem.

Acute on-the-job stress, increasingly strained police-community relations, and haunting personal memories of nasty encounters with police officers are often cited by college-level minority students when they explain why they shun membership in the Police Department. Consequently, an ambitious recruitment drive last April, backed by a $10 million advertising campaign, produced only a 5 percent gain in minority applicants over the previous year - and left New York with one of the nation’s least racially diverse departments among big cities (in 1999, whites made up 67 percent of the force but only 43 percent of the city’s population).

In the April campaign, about 450,000 applications were distributed throughout the five boroughs, according to the department. Of that number, 15,200 candidates applied to take the exam, an increase of 7 percent over the January 1999 recruitment effort but far short of unprecedented 32,000 city residents who applied for the exam in 1996.

The breakdown of April’s minority applicants was as follows: 26.3 percent African American, up 5.2 percent from January 1999; 30.3 percent Hispanic, up 4.7 percent; and 3.7 percent Asian, up 0.5 percent.

Entry requirements are more stringent today than some years ago when the Police Department required only a high school degree. Applicants must now possess 60 college credits. They must also have a valid driver’s license and be free of a criminal record. Psychological testing, a critical element for entry, has also become more rigorous.

Deputy Police Commissioner Yolanda B. Jimenez, mindful of the controversy surrounding the department, called the recruitment effort "an absolute success when you think about all of the negative media. We wanted to do better than last year and we did."

But the department’s campaign may have done little to dispel minority college students’ belief that a career as an officer lacked promise. In interviews, a dozen young people of color all expressed negative feelings toward police officers based on officers’ treatment of them or other residents in minority communities.

"I just don’t like them," said college student Jean Pierre, 27, a Haitian-American from East Flatbush in Brooklyn who graduates this month . "The badge gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want."

Pierre recounted several incidents where he was harassed by police. Once, while jogging in his neighborhood, he was stopped for appearing "suspicious," he said. He also recalled witnessing encounters between his friends and police where his friends were questioned or detained for no apparent reason.

The police, Pierre said, have soured a whole generation on joining the department. According to him, young people wanting to improve their neighborhoods don't consider police work an option. Pierre plans to serve his community by teaching in New York’s public school system after graduation.

His colleague, Cristina Cocheo, a 28-year-old woman of mixed Irish-Italian-Panamanian heritage, echoed Pierre’s sentiment of disdain for police officers. "They need to clean up their reputation, then they can talk about recruiting," said Cocheo, who is majoring in international studies. "They’re a club that no one wants to be a part of."

Cocheo recounted several incidents of sexual harassment by police officers toward her and other women in her predominantly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights. She remembered one officer in particular from the 26th Precinct who stopped her while driving and said she had failed to signal a right turn on a one-way street. When she questioned his logic, he asked her out to dinner. Cocheo said she filed a complaint and the officer was sent to sexual harassment training.

He treated her, she said, like a hooker. Cocheo insisted that, if police officers behaved in a more dignified way, the city wouldn’t be in its current position.

Veteran police officers such as Detective Victor Mendoza, who are proud of their service, express frustration over stories like those told by Pierre and Cocheo.

According to Mendoza, many members of the force consider the most recent recruitment campaign a failure and link the response to a public backlash against police after several high-profile cases of alleged police brutality, including those of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, who were shot by officers.

Mendoza, an dark skinned officer of Dominican descent who has patrolled Washington Heights for over 17 years, said that morale problems within the department were the most serious he has seen since entering the police academy in 1973.

"You used to be able to more freely approach people on street corners," he said. "Clearing the streets is now considered a violation of human rights."

A fellow officer, Sgt. Rich Hernandez, agreed with Mendoza’s grim assessment of police-community relations. A white native of Puerto Rico who says he has an unblemished service record, Hernandez has policed New York City streets for more than 10 years. All anyone in New York City talks about anymore, he said, is race and how it relates to police performance. But, he said, it is important to remember that the department’s sole mission is to enforce the law, not to provide social services to the community. "People forget that," he said, "and still we treat them with courtesy" With over 11,000 police officers scheduled to retire within the next two years, police officials are hard-pressed to change existing perceptions and invigorate the department’s recruitment process. The need for change may appear to some even more critical in light of recent minority recruitment successes by other police departments, such as Los Angeles and Miami. Recently, the Los Angeles department recruited for a week at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and emerged with 1,613 applicants, mostly people of color, according to New York magazine.

Terrence Harris, director of continuing education at John Jay College, oversees the university’s police cadet training program. He said he believes that city officials must aggressively work within police ranks to immediately improve negative perceptions before spending another dollar on recruitment drives or advertising. Success can be achieved, he said, through increased sensitivity training, human dignity and cultural development workshops, and development of police role models.

Once the department improves its internal practices, he said, senior police officials and working officers should actively develop stronger ties to the city’s diverse communities by regularly visiting middle schools and high schools throughout the city.

"Minority children on the streets, they’re targeted by the police," he said. "The only way change comes about is when they [the police] get involved. They have to be the change they want to see."

Harris also called the starting pay of a police officer "ridiculously low" and stressed the need for the city to increase salaries, noting that Nassau and Suffolk County’s beginning pay is in the mid-$40,000 range. New York City is supposed to have the finest police force in the country, he said, but salaries do not reflect it.

Harris’ interviews with thousands of New York City students confirm that bright, motivated people of color lean toward jobs with greater pay, quality working conditions and less stressful path to professional success. Marlene Brito, a 17-year-old honor roll student and senior class president at George Washington High School in Washington Heights, fits his profile of the emerging young minority professional. She was recently accepted to New York University for this fall and plans to pursue a dual major of science and technology.

Ask Brito if she has ever considered a career as a New York City police officer and she’ll quickly respond: "Not an option."

Brito said she plans to go to where more money -- and greater community respect -- can be found.