Watching the Left eat its own would be funny if it weren’t so scary. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, US Senator from Vermont and a self-described socialist, was shoved aside and silenced last week while speaking at a campaign rally in Seattle. The party-crashers were members of the Black Lives Matters movement and they came to lecture the crowd on its own racism. Sanders yielded the microphone to an angry, rambling black woman before fleeing the stage entirely.
Within twenty-four hours, his campaign released a new platform addressing “racial justice.” It was obvious that Sanders was striking a conciliatory tone for not having been sensitive enough to black issues sooner.
The Sanders platform calls for “police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities.” While that may be boilerplate Democrat-speak, it’s not an innocuous policy proposal. Besides the fact that it’s proven difficult to achieve, forcing racial proportionality on police departments comes with its own perils.
“Looking like the community” is very important to liberals, and not just on the police force. They consider it to be of the utmost importance that the fire department, the president’s cabinet, and even the military “look like” the constituencies they’re supposed to serve. Apparently firemen put out fires better when there’s a Jew, an Italian, and a Puerto Rican on every fire engine. Don’t ask me why.
Diversifying a police department is easier said than done. City officials often mistakenly assume that police forces aren’t “diverse” enough because no one has yet laid out the welcome mat for minority applicants. They soon discover that recruiting minorities, particularly blacks, is arduous. Besides the fact that many young blacks don’t want to become what they despise, they often don’t meet basic qualifications. As NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said in June, “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 touched a nerve with his remark but he also spoke the truth. One reason there aren’t more black police officers is standards—moral, legal, and academic. Police departments across the country have chosen to lower standards just to recruit blacks. Some departments have stopped requiring applicants to know how to swim while others will hire applicants who didn’t even finish high school. Departments often accept lower civil service exam scores from minority applicants. And it’s still not enough.
Proponents of “diversity” also blithely brush aside another issue—namely that their rhetoric is strongly suggestive of a quota system. Quotas were found to be illegal in Regents of California v. Bakke (1978), a landmark affirmative action case.
The man at the center of the case was an engineer and Vietnam veteran named Allan Bakke. He’s also white. While in his mid-thirties, Bakke decided that practicing medicine was his true calling in life so he quit his job with NASA and applied to medical schools. He could not secure a spot, despite his high test scores and obvious intelligence. After discovering that he was far more qualified than many of the black and Hispanic applicants who had been accepted under the minority quota, he decided to sue the University of California.
Bakke took his case all the way to the Supreme Court and won. The judges’ decision hinged on the quota system, which they ruled unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it was a very narrow victory, benefiting mostly Bakke himself. He was admitted to medical school and achieved his dream of becoming a doctor. Today he’s an anesthesiologist in Minnesota.
On the whole, however, it was a good day for affirmative action. The court ruled that a public university may consider race as one factor among many in its admissions considerations. Quotas, on the other hand, are verboten. Ever since Bakke, affirmative action supporters have meticulously avoided the “Q” word, without ever giving up on the idea. These days, public officials usually speak of “goals.” But what is a goal except a quota by another name? If, for example, Ferguson PD sets a goal for itself that it will reflect the demographics of the community it serves, that necessarily means that 67.4% of the officers will have to be black. Hiring decisions will have to be adjusted to meet that goal.
That’s called a quota and it’s illegal. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
There’s another problem with police departments reflecting the communities that they serve and it becomes apparent when looking at communities that have very low minority populations. Can a small town that is almost entirely white refuse to hire minority officers because they don’t “look like the community?”
I think most people would say no, and so would I. But there’s a disconnect there. Why is “looking like the community” so vitally important in some communities but not in others? It seems that police departments have to be colorblind when colorblindness benefits minorities, and color conscious when color consciousness benefits minorities. In short, they have to be color conscious when deciding whether or not to be colorblind.
A case in point can be found in Granville, Massachusetts, a picturesque New England town that looks like something from a Norman Rockwell painting. Despite being 98.69% white, Granville hired an Hispanic police chief in 2005.
And no one cared. That’s not because the people of Granville are a bunch of hippy liberals. Granville is in fact the most conservative town in the state, according to Business Insider. The people of Granville didn’t bat an eye because they don’t feel entitled to a police force that looks like them. That idea is part of the larger black entitlement complex that they, as white conservatives, neither share nor understand.
It bears mentioning that Chief Jose Rivera, while he served as Granville’s Chief of Police, was the only full time officer in the department. That’s how small Granville is, and how safe. Should a town that’s almost 99% white be served by a (full time) police force that’s 100% Hispanic? I don’t have a problem with it, but then again I’m not a liberal. I don’t concern myself with racial bean-counting.
If lily white communities like Granville are going to be prohibited from hiring officers with an eye toward the racial makeup of their community, and highly “diverse” communities like Ferguson are going to be required to do exactly that, then someone will have to delineate a threshold between the two. At what point must a community shift from an ostensibly colorblind hiring process to an obligatory color-conscious hiring process? Ten percent minority? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?
I think we already know the answer to that question. All of that jive about “looking like the community” is a one-way street. If it helps blacks, great. If it doesn’t, it’s dropped like a bad habit. I call that black privilege.
“Diverse” police forces are not the answer to all that ails us. Besides the fact that recruiting blacks is more difficult than might be supposed, there are legal and moral issues to consider. Standards must be lowered and qualified people must be passed over.
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