Minority Officers
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In the past decade, highly publicized incidents of police brutality and excessive violence against minorities have created a divisive community wherein minorities charge law enforcement officers as racist and abusive. The brutal shooting of Amadou Diallo in a hail of 41 bullets, the savage rape of Abner Louima with a plunger handle while in police custody, and other highly publicized acts of police brutality and excessive force against minorities have made many law enforcement agencies rethink their hiring and policing policies. To this end, many have purposefully been recruiting, training, and retaining higher numbers of minorities on their forces. Some have not. As one expert on the situation relates “New York has a terrible record on the recruitment of African-American officers, even though they’ve hired more officers than any other police department in the country…In a city that is 29% black, only 13% of the officer are African-American. By contrast, in Boston, 26% of the residents are black; so are 24% of its officers” (Mason 1). Despite the efforts of many police departments across the country to recruit and hire more minorities, some doubt that efforts will be enough to reduce crime and foster a higher degree of community cooperation and cohesion. This analysis will research the efforts of police departments to hire more minorities toward these goals, as well as revealing statistics which demonstrate whether o
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s is when there is a decree in force” (Hillig 1). If the NAACP is successful in its suit, it would require the city to hire enough minorities in its police and fire departments to reach 18% of the overall number of employees (Hillig 1).
Yet, even if this suit is successful and in light of the increased efforts of other police departments to achieve similar goals, there are some who doubt if these actions will be enough to help resolve community tensions while reducing crime. Because of these doubts, researchers have conduced studies to determine if such actions have an impact of the percentage of crimes in neighborhoods with higher ethnic representation of the police force. John J. Donohue III, of Stanford Law School, culled data from 134 major U.S. cities from 1977 to 1993 to analyze how the ethnic composition of police forces affected arrest and crime patterns (Koretz 27). Their findings support the fact that greater racial composition on local police forces reduces crime and arrests. They theorize this is because own-race policing is thought to lead to fewer incidences of police misconduct and greater deterrence among potential criminals. As they note:
The higher the share of police officers of a particular race in a ne
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1460
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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