Thesis on "Police Recruitment and Hiring Has Change"

Thesis 5 pages (1415 words) Sources: 5 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Police recruitment and hiring has change with the times, just as so many other forms of public service recruitment and hiring have changed. Recruitment of police employees seeks to meet the needs of the community, the department and to follow many if not all of the federal hiring guidelines, to support minority employment, including the employment of women, (Broadnax, 2000, p. 366) as well as the productive employment of Americans with disabilities according to the 1992 Americans with Disabilities Act. (Kurke & Scrivner, 1995, p. 7) The balancing of all these directives is challenging but essential to a strong and accountable police force.

Police forces of every size and type and every level of policing to some degree form a core of the public employment in many communities and have over the years been responsible for benchmark adoption of public hiring processes that are inclusive of many needs. While new recruits must meet a certain legal, psychological and physical requirement to prove fit to perform the duties of a police officer the departments must also be compliant with and accountable to the community with fair regard for the rights of individuals to fair hiring practices. They must be conscientious of the ability of these officers to safely and adequately perform their duties to the community, meeting the needs of the community at a certain predetermined level of police enforcement, meet all the demanding needs of internal department support all within the standards set for public employment in civil service.

Affirmative action became an issue in police recruitment far earlier than it did in other professions as the development of recruiting pools was recognized as in need of expansion to account for the higher percentage of minorities in the community. The stark difference between the composition of many communities and the actual demographic population was pointed out repeatedly when police forces were seen in the community dealing with minority crime. The communities themselves as well as federal hiring practices called into question the fact that many police recruits in many communities were of the majority and therefore seemingly supportive only of the majority view of crime and victimization.

Though this is not to say that all police officers or agencies where inherently racist or that tactics they used automatically fell in this realm simply because they were white the public reality of white enforcement officers in minority dealings often became a stark visual example of continued institutional discrimination in the U.S. For the sake of keeping the peace police recruitment had to face the reality that its public face could not be seen and therefore accused of supporting unconditionally old racial stereotypes and racist policies of policing minorities. (Hahn & Jeffries, 2003, p. 78)

One of the most serious consequences of the relatively restricted sources of police recruitment was the difficulty of hiring minority police officers. 31 For many years in most urban departments, the proportion of black police officers was substantially below the percentage of black residents in the city, and relatively few black officers were promoted to high police ranks. 32 William G. Lewis notes that the continuing absence of blacks on police forces as employment opportunities for minorities were expanding in other occupations created a strong suspicion that efforts were being made in many cities to prevent them from becoming police officers. 33 (Hahn & Jeffries, 2003, p. 78)

The same can also be said of many departments with regard to gender diversity and later employment of Americans with disabilities. Though individuals hired must prove fit according tot the demands of the job, those fitness guidelines were to some degree in need of special consideration for minorities, i.e. more minority candidates. (Sproule & Berkley, 2001, p. 377) As fair employment practices became the standard hiring mantra in the public sector, police forces had the common responsibility to support and reflect these changes, in a legal and real sense. (Broadnax, 2000, p. 366)

Police forces were also charged with to some degree setting original benchmarks for affirmative actions goals within communities as they are in many communities one of the most public of all forms of public service being daily involved in community policing and therefore very visible in the community and subject to repeated public… READ MORE

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