It sounds like a perfectly legitimate reason…it’s likley
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has claimed it is hard to hire more black cops because ‘so many of them’ have spent time in jail.
‘We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail,’ he told The Guardian. ‘And, as such, we can’t hire them.’
Partially to blame for the pool of eligible officers that is ‘much smaller than it might ordinarily have been’ is the NPYD’s controversial stop and frisk policy that was shut down in 2013, said Bratton.
The NPYD commissioner said stop and frisk had ‘unfortunate consequences’ as it resulted in a number of young black men receiving summons for minor misdemeanors.
Stop and frisk, which allowed police to question and potentially search someone if they had so-called ‘reasonable suspicion’ that person was committing an offense, was ruled unconstitutional in August 2013 by Judge Shira A Scheindlin.
Scheindlin said the program was a violation of both black and Hispanic people’s right to equal protection, as they were being stopped at much higher rates than those who were white.
Both demographics made up 84 percent of the people who were stopped by officers using the policy, according to a report by the Public Advocate’s office and cited by the Washington Post.
Fifty-three percent of that figure was made up of black people.
Black recruits made up only 6.86 percent of this year’s police academy, according to another Guardian report, in a city where they represent 22 percent of the population.
The NYPD stopped supporting the policy when Bratton returned as commissioner in 2014, after serving in Los Angeles.
But he continued to defend a policy he had New York adopt in the early 1990s, dubbed broken windows, which some of his critics say is where the the real blame should lay.
Robert Gangi, the director of the Police Reform Organizing Project in New York, said stop and frisk was not at the heart of the problem but a symptom of broken windows’ ‘blatant racist policing’.
Via:UK Daily Mail
