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Posted: 7:00 a.m. Sunday,
Dec. 14, 2014
PUBLIC SAFETY
Minorities underrepresented in local police
agencies
By http://www.journal-news.com/staff/josh-sweigart/" rel="nofollow - Staff Writer
Namron Bush’s young, black face stood out
among the crowd of white students who were repeating a police officer’s oath on
stage.
Bush, along with 20 others, was about to
graduate from a peace officer training academy at Sinclair Community College in
Dayton on Tuesday and go on to seek jobs in law enforcement across southwest
Ohio.
Police agencies across the region rarely
hire minorities like Bush. The area’s biggest police departments employ dozens
of officers but often only a handful are black, Hispanic or Asian-American, and
none mirror the diversity of the community they patrol, the Journal-News found.
After 18 weeks of training, Bush hopes to
change those numbers.
“The more I’ve seen (in the national news),
the more I kind of want to make the impact toward getting a positive image of
police officers, hopefully, encouraging other black men to even become police
officers,” Bush said.
In an era of growing mistrust between
police and black residents because of high-profile incidents involving police
who have shot or strangled black men and children, that disparity is coming
under closer scrutiny.
Officers
across the region say that they want a diverse workforce that looks like the
community but have trouble finding interested and qualified minority applicants
who want to join the force.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that there continues to be a challenge
for law enforcement to recruit minority members,” Ohio Attorney General Mike
DeWine told this newspaper. “It clearly needs to be dealt with.”
But others argue police agencies are just
not doing enough to recruit minorities.
“It’s a solvable problem,” said Patrick
Oliver, director of the criminal justice program at Cedarville University
and a former police chief. Oliver added that police departments need to encourage
children at a young age to think about becoming a cop.
“Agencies need to do something different,”
Oliver said. “If you do what you’ve always done before, you’re going to get
what you’ve always gotten before.”
‘We make excuses’
The city of Hamilton — which has a minority population of
16 percent — will consider multiple factors, including race, when it hires at
least three new officers next year, Capt. Craig Bucheit told the Journal-News.
Earlier this week, the city announced a new
commission that will study how Hamilton’s
city departments can attract and hire more diverse employees at all levels of
government. And, the city’s police department submitted an annual recruitment
plan that includes having the chief consider disparities between the city’s
workforce demographics and the police department’s racial composition when
hiring.
Police officials are also pushing the city
to agree to give the agency’s police chief more power to pick from a wider pool
of applicants. Currently, he can only
make selections based on who scores in the top percentile on entry exams.
“When the community looks to police
officers and they see a reflection of themselves within the police force, I
think that goes a long way to building and maintaining trust,” Bucheit said.
Hamilton’s police force
doesn’t look like the rest of the community, though. Of the 105 cops, four
black and two Hispanic officers patrol the streets of this city, home to more
than 62,000.
Bucheit said the department has trouble
finding minorities who want to become officers. And, in the testing process
other qualifications, such as if the officer speaks Spanish or has a bachelor’s
degree are more important than race.
“The biggest challenge to hiring (diverse
officers) is making sure we have qualified people in the process from the
beginning,” Bucheit said. “The chief can’t hire someone who doesn’t show up and
take the test. We can recruit all we want, but if someone doesn’t show up and
take the test and put their name in, we can never hire them.”
Council member Archie Johnson argues the
city’s lack of workplace diversity is a systemic failure and officials haven’t
tried hard enough to find minorities to fill openings. He wants to see the
police department seek out minority residents from across Hamilton to apply for positions.
“A lot of people say, ‘they don’t apply,’”
Johnson said of minorities. “(City officials) are not willing to cross the line
to make the difference. It’s easier to blame the applicants than it is to make
the effort. We make excuses.”
Johnson, who has been outspoken about how
minorities are treated in Hamilton, fears the
city would be ill-equipped to handle an event like the police shooting death of
unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Mo.
Race relations in trouble?
In addition to the Ferguson shooting,
protests were sparked locally in August when a police officer shot and killed
John Crawford III, a Fairfield man, while he strolled through a Walmart in
Beavercreek with an air rifle in hand. Police mistook the item for a real gun.
Televisions across the country have
recently shown videos of a 12-year-old boy at a Cleveland
park killed while playing with a toy gun and a man in New York City choked to death.
All of the victims were black and the
officers were white.
The series
of events has led some to question relations between cops and the communities
they police as well as the small number of black men and women serving those
agencies.
More than half of the blacks surveyed in a
Pew Research poll out this week said they anticipate race relations between
police and the community will worsen within the next year; 34 percent of whites
said the same.
Even forces praised for their diversity,
such as the Cincinnati Police Department where 30 percent of the officers are
black, still don’t represent what the community looks like. More than 44
percent of the people living in Cincinnati
are black.
Deep-seated racial homogeneity is more
prevalent in police forces across some of southwest Ohio’s suburbs.
Middletown,
West Chester and Fairfield
also fail to employ the same percentage of minority police officers that are
living in the area.
Out of the 87 police officers working for West Chester, which has a minority community of 23.6
percent, one is Hispanic and one is black. In Fairfield, where 21 percent of the people
identify as minorities, two officers are black and the remaining 55 are white.
Other areas, such as Liberty Township,
are patrolled by the Butler County Sheriff’s Office and roughly six percent of
the people working in that office are a minority. The agency was not able to
immediately provide a breakdown on race or the positions of those working in
their demographics analysis.
‘Make an impact’
Police in Middletown, where more than 16 percent of the
community is a minority, say they know it’s a problem their force doesn’t look
like the rest of the population. 65 officers working for the force are white,
four are black, one is Middle Eastern, another Japanese and one is Korean.
But they also don’t know how to fix the
problem or why minorities don’t often apply for the positions, Deputy Chief
Rodney Muterspaw said.
“That’s a good question, we’ve asked that
question of ourselves,” Muterspaw said. “I don’t really know.”
Because of budget constraints, he said the
department is limited to recruiting candidates that have already gone through a
police training academy on their own dime. They often look for recruits at
Sinclair or Butler
Tech Development
Schools.
Racial
diversity is slim there, too.
Since 2012, Butler Tech has graduated 178
students from its 17-week police training academy and 92 percent of those
cadets were white.
He doesn’t have an answer but Muterspaw
wonders, though, if some black or Hispanic kids are turned off at an early age
from becoming a cop because they see so few that look like them.
“If you’re a young person growing up in an
area of town and you see the officer coming to your house is totally different
from you, you might think, ‘I’m not able to do that job,’” Muterspaw said.
That’s an image Bush, the Sinclair graduate
who is now on the hunt for a job as a police officer, hopes to change.
“I was laying on the couch, I was like,
‘Man, I’m just tired of seeing all of this negative imagery of being a police
officer.’ And I thought of how I could make an impact,” he said. “So, simply
becoming an officer and creating that positive imagery towards police officers
helped me make that decision.”
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