Post Office to Toughen Hiring Rules : Violence: Agency, racked by shootings by employees, tells a House panel it will hire a company to perform background checks.

WASHINGTON —  U.S. Postal Service executives, concerned about a decade of post office-related violence by unstable or disgruntled workers, told members of Congress Wednesday that they are taking steps to improve screening of job applicants and to mend relations between employees and managers.

Postmaster General Marvin T. Runyon Jr. told members of two House subcommittees that the Postal Service is teaching its personnel officials how to improve their screening of job seekers and is about to hire an outside firm to perform background checks on applicants.

“Probably we have not done a good job of making selections in the past,” Runyon said in an interview after his appearance.

Since 1983, 34 people have been killed and 20 others wounded in a dozen post office-related shootings across the country. Congressional investigators have said that work tensions or unstable employees were a factor in each instance.

On May 6, a discharged mail carrier burst into the Dana Point post office and opened fire as part of a violent two-day rampage that terrorized Orange County and left two dead and five wounded, authorities said. Earlier that day, a postal worker in suburban Detroit killed one person and wounded two others before taking his own life in a Postal Service garage.

In the Dana Point incident, Mark Richard Hilbun, who had been treated for a manic-depressive disorder, was accused of shooting two people while they were working at the post office, killing one. Witnesses said Hilbun was searching for a fellow postal employee, Kimberly Springer, whom he had been stalking for months.

Hilbun, 38, has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and remains in custody in the Orange County Jail. Medical experts are examining him and have until Aug. 27 to determine whether he is mentally competent to stand trial.

After the incidents, the Postal Service began analyzing the files of its criminal investigative branch, the Postal Inspection Service, in an attempt to identify “common denominators” among employees who have been involved in shootings, assaults or threats of violence.

Runyon complained that the media have portrayed the effort as a “secret study” to generate a psychological profile of the type of employee likely to commit violent acts. Some workers, especially Vietnam veterans, were concerned that such an investigation would subject them to unfair scrutiny.

Runyon said that the study is not going to result in a psychological profile. Instead, it will identify certain incidents or behaviors that might serve as an early warning sign of trouble.

The Postal Service hopes that, by overhauling its hiring practices, it can avoid employing troubled individuals like the former Royal Oak, Mich., postal worker who killed four supervisors before turning a gun on himself in November, 1991.

After the incident, investigators learned that while in the military the individual had earned a reputation for violent outbursts, including running over an officer’s car with a tank after an argument. But postal personnel officials hired him because they were unfamiliar with the military jargon of release papers and did not realize that the individual had received a less-than-honorable discharge.

By hiring an outside firm to check military, criminal, employment and driving records of applicants, postal officials now hope that they will be freed to concentrate on evaluating job seekers’ performance in interviews and on civil service tests, though they said they will not require applicants to submit to psychological tests.

Runyon also said that the Postal Service is trying to rid itself of what he called “paramilitary” management practices. The service long has been known as a hierarchical organization with an authoritarian management culture but a number of recent reforms are designed to build teamwork.

Future performance evaluations will include the opinions of subordinates, not just supervisors. Managers with strong people skills will move on in their careers, Runyon said; those with poor people skills will not be promoted until the skills are improved through training.

But Rep. Frank McCloskey (D-Ind.) said that he is skeptical such measures will be effective.

“We’ve gone on about this for years,” McCloskey said. “You still have problem managers and no amount of Dale Carnegie charm school treatment is going to change them into nice people.”

Despite detailing the various measures to head off post office violence, Runyon insisted that the Postal Service is no more violent than other labor sectors. With 680,000 employees, he said, the Postal Service is the nation’s largest civilian employer and is bound to encounter violence in its ranks.