NY Police Commissioner: Hard To Hire Black Cops Because We Jail So Many Of Them

[su_publirb]

(AP Photo/Philip Scott Andrews, File)

Bill Bratton makes an interesting case, while pointing out that the previous policy of “stop and frisk” has been harmful.

In other words, Bratton is arguing that because having been to jail is all but an insurmountable barrier to becoming an officer, and because so many black New Yorkers have been locked up, the NYPD is having an awfully hard time finding black people who are eligible to become cops. And presumably, that is why the police academy’s 2015 graduating class has the lowest percentage of black graduates since the 1960s. (6.8 percent of the upcoming class is black, compared to 7.3 percent in 1970, the Guardian points out.)

But if a disproportionate number of black New Yorkers have been arrested, who do we blame but the demonstrably biased police department that arrested them? Bratton is remarkably self-aware on this point:

Bratton blamed the “unfortunate consequences” of an explosion in “stop, question and frisk” incidents that caught many young men of color in the net. As a result, Bratton said, the “population pool [of eligible non-white officers] is much smaller than it might ordinarily have been”.

[su_facebook]

[su_center_ad]

D.B. Hirsch

D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.