The New York Times-20080127-Unlikely Recruits Heed The Call of the Sagebrush

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Unlikely Recruits Heed The Call of the Sagebrush

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LAST fall, after the Nassau County Police Department set up a mobile recruiting station in Downtown Brooklyn, 45 New York police officers resigned to join the Long Island force en masse.

The enthusiastic response was unsurprising. New York has long proved fertile ground for nearby law enforcement agencies. Departments like those of Suffolk County and Yonkers, as well as the State Police, all have the city's former finest among their ranks.

But the latest police force to put out recruitment feelers -- promising better pay, a signing bonus and a squad car for personal use -- is perhaps the most remote. Early last month, the Albuquerque Police Department plastered a hot pink and purple billboard on Grand Street near Crosby Street in SoHo, depicting a sweeping desert sunset over a rugged mountain range. It exhorts an unlikely audience of potential police recruits -- shoppers, local loft owners -- to Join the Team out West.

Or, as Lieut. Shawn O'Connell of the Albuquerque department put it, We'll take all the New Yorkers we can get.

Lieutenant O'Connell said he had gotten the idea for the ad from a friend named Nate Korn, the owner of a police supply shop in Albuquerque, who mentioned that advertising space would soon become available on a building he owned in SoHo.

Lieutenant O'Connell asked if Mr. Korn would temporarily donate the space to his department (according to Mr. Korn, the previous advertiser, the Discovery Channel, paid $20,000 a month). Mr. Korn agreed, allowing the force to use it through this month.

Since the billboard made its appearance, nearly three dozen people, including an optician, a computer technician, a purchasing manager and two current city police officers, have called the recruitment hot line. One enterprising New Yorker even flew to New Mexico to take the qualifying test, but -- possibly because of the altitude, as Albuquerque is 5,000 feet above sea level -- she failed the physical fitness portion.

Early next month, Detective Jon Hafner, newly retired from the New York police force, will also take the exam, although he learned about Albuquerque's recruitment effort through the Internet, not the billboard.

Detective Hafner, who is 43, retired in July, on the first day he was eligible to collect the city's pension and generous benefits, after 20 years on the force. He still wanted to be a police officer but he was told by officials in Nassau and Suffolk Counties that they wouldn't take a new recruit his age. Then he discovered Albuquerque.

New Mexico doesn't have age limits, said Detective Hafner, who is married to a dentist and has two young children. It's kind of like California, but not quite. I like the weather, and I like a little bit more country life.

After four decades in New York, Detective Hafner views a possible move to the sunny Southwest as his piece of the American Dream.

I think you're supposed to come here off the boat or off the plane and go west, like you were supposed to go west 200 years ago, he said. It's supposed to be, 'Go west, young man!'

[Illustration]PHOTO: We'll take all the New Yorkers we can get, said an Albuquerque official. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE FORNABAIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)