It’s not that police departments don’t attempt to hire nonwhite police officers; it’s that many nonwhite would-be recruits already have criminal records, rendering them ineligible. … At least that’s New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s opinion, according to a report from The Guardian.
“We have a significant population gap among African-American males because so many of them have spent time in jail, and as such, we can’t hire them,” Bratton told the media site.
However, the police commissioner was quick to acknowledge that budget restrictions and problematic police tactics that target black and Latino individuals have also hampered the effort to achieve some kind of racial parity in police forces.
Bratton pointed out the “unfortunate consequences” of many tactics, such as “stop, question and frisk,” which disproportionately affect people of color, thus rendering the “population pool [of eligible nonwhite officers] … smaller than it might ordinarily have been.”
It is common knowledge that the police commissioner believes in “broken-windows policing,” or the strategy of enforcing laws regarding relatively minor crimes in order to deter offenders from committing more serious ones. It is, however, one tactic that Bratton is less ready to give up.
“We will continue our focus on crime and disorder,” Bratton told The Guardian. “I make no apologies for doing that.”
Read more at The Guardian.