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 or not such actions are effective.
In light of growing community discontent among minorities who view racial profiling, police brutality, and racism among law enforcement officer tactics, police departments across the nation have stepped up efforts to recruit and hire more minority officers as one method of helping resolve this discontent. In the Mid-West, there is a rolling program in operation whose goal is to see an additional 500 minority officers hired in the region (Drive 5). As one police chief no...