Demonize Police, And Here's What Happens

 

Pravda-on-the-Hudson has an interesting article up that inadvertently showcases one of the effects of  efforts to demonize police by the #blacklivesmatter movement and its media and political supporters.

Here's the headline: "Heroin Use? Juvenile Record? For Recruits, Police forgive Past Sins."

The article breathlessly goes on...and note what I emphasized:

But now, faced with thousands of vacancies, a shortage of applicants and a mandate to become as diverse as the communities they serve, police departments are rethinking requirements once considered untouchable.

New Orleans no longer automatically disqualifies those who have injected heroin or smoked crack. Aurora, Colo., has stopped using military-style running tests, but now checks how quickly candidates can get out of a squad car.

Pittsburgh, accused of discriminating against black applicants, recently updated its hiring criteria to include integrity, dependability and “cultural competence,” or the ability to incorporate diverse perspectives.

In other words, the current climate created by #blacklivesmatter, the media and Democrat politicians who cater to #blacklivesmatter for political reasons means that a lot of ordinarily desirable recruits who met the old standards involving background checks required to be hired as a police officer are no longer applying. Instead, because police departments are desperate for recruits, they're opening the doors to hiring former gangbangers. With special diversity points if they're black or Hispanic. Because of course, white police are automatically racist and can't be expected to have the 'cultural competence' to treat non-whites with fairness and competence.

 

In St. Paul, the department has experimented with a number of ways to find the best officers, including taking some “situational judgment” questions — meant to test common sense, adherence to police hierarchy and police priorities — off the written exam.

Chief Todd Axtell said the tests might have been unintentionally biased against minorities, proving particularly difficult for those who are not native English speakers.

“We’ve got a lot of diversity in St. Paul, and we’ve struggled with recruiting in the past, so we need to be more thoughtful about these communities,” he said. {...}

For 'minorities' read 'Somalis.'

The department’s new written tests now focus more on personal histories and community engagement, and interviews have been refocused to allow applicants to personally explain incidents that may have previously disqualified them.

“Some people have been caught doing bad things and other people haven’t been caught,” Chief Axtell said. “The question we have is, ‘Was ownership taken?’”

Ownership???? As in 'yeah, I did it. I've gotten over it, you should too.'

As police departments grapple with complaints of excessive use of force and retrain officers to “de-escalate,” or defuse, tense encounters, Chief Axtell said he had used the interviews to identify one personality flaw that in the past might have gone overlooked.

“People who I believe have a short fuse,” he said, “will not get the opportunity in this department.”

Not that we want trigger happy police, but we've already seen policemen being murdered attempting to 'de-escalate.'

Now this isn't the first time this sort of change  has happened after the media whips up an incident to  a frenzy. After the Rodney King riots, old school police chief Daryl Gates was forced out and Willie Williams, Los Angeles's first black police chief was hurriedly hired. Williams proved comically inept and had personal corruption issues to the point where the City of Los Angeles eventually bought his contract out for a hefty sum to get rid of him. But he hung around long enough to implement new hiring practiced in the LAPD that pretty much mirrored what the New York Times is talking about here, where standards for police were dramatically lowered.

The result was the Rampart Division scandal, which involved  major police corruption including falsifying evidence, perjury, the targeting of specific gangs for the benefit of other sets and the theft of drugs by policemen from police property areas among other things. In the end, Ramparts negated over 100 convictions, put criminals who were actually guilty of violent crimes back on the streets  because of police errors and cost the City of Los Angeles  $125 million in financial settlements.

 It's a guaranteed recipe. Demonize police in big cities with fake prosecutions like Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and add a healthy dose of racialist politics. Then watch as people with impeccable backgrounds no longer find the job desirable and don't apply, or the ones already there get fed up and leave as the job becomes unbearable. 

Then, when you lower the standards simply to get more bodies on the street with diversity uber alles as a guideline, that leads to a whole different set of problems.

No police force is perfect, but demonizing police for political purposes is always a bad idea.  And keep in mind that the people sponsoring this kind of attitude usually don't have to live with the consequences, because they have 24-7 private security...many times paid for by the taxes on the same people  who will have to live with those consequences.