Don Roach: Don’t Force Diversity on the Providence Police Department

Wednesday, November 04, 2015

Don Roach, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

 

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Someone once told me, “Don you are the most read Black man in Rhode Island.” I responded by saying, “what other black man in Rhode Island is writing about politics?” Diversity has always been a tricky subject for me. 

If you force diversity you risk creating a culture where the diverse candidate is ostracized and alienated for being some sort of quota statistic. If you disregard diversity, you run the risk of creating a homogenous culture that is not in tune with its customer/service base and could potentially alienate the same leading to – for businesses – being left in the dust by those organizations that are adept at meeting the needs of a changing and diverse market. 

Additionally, people who think the same tend to come up with the same ideas but when you have a diverse talent pool it’s likely you’ll see different ideas and not just the same tired ideas addressing the company/organization’s ills. While all of that abstract idealism is great, in the real world it doesn’t always function this way. 

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Take the Providence Police Department which has a police force that has no African American above the rank of Sargeant. According to a GoLocal story, there are 402 policemen and women in Providence’s police force and 16% of the city is African American. I’m not sure how many members of the PVD are ranked at Sargeant or higher but having 1 at the rank of just Sargent seems troubling. The city makeup is such that 54 percent of the city is either black or Latino, and it seems odd that the police force doesn’t reflect this. 

The oddity is that if people are applying to the police force in equal numbers as they are represented within the city, there should certainly be more representation across racial/ethnic lines than appears to be the case. Rallying at City Hall on Monday, Representative Joe Almeida stated people need to see more officers who look like them to feel more comfortable with the police. 

I get that, I do. You’d like to think that if the police force reflected the demographics of the community it would instill greater trust in the PVD and lead to greater cooperation, lower criminal rates, and all the bells and whistles people who clamor for diversity talk about. I get that, but at the end of the day there are reasons beyond overt racism that cause police forces to not look like the communities they serve. Whether it’s a lack of candidates or union policies that – how shall I say – don’t necessarily make it easy for promotions to occur without knowing the right person, there are real reasons why PVD and other departments are not diverse.

In my opinion, the answer is not as Almeida and others are calling for – hiring an African-American Major on the police force. Yes it creates a management position for a diverse candidate but recall the alienation and ostracizing I mentioned earlier. I can’t speak to this directly, but I’d imagine trust is important in any police force and imagine hiring someone to a position of authority just because they have more melanin in their skin than someone else. How do you think that will go over? I hear many of my readers saying, “I don’t care what people think we need diversity!!” I think putting someone in a position of power because of race isn’t the answer to creating diversity. Instead, you have to start at the source, recruiting. The PVD must focus on attracting candidates in places they may not typically look and search for ways to fill their lower ranks with officers who better reflect the community. From there it should become a simple math game in that people should start getting opportunities at promotion simply because there is a more diverse pool to pick from. 

It’s not rocket science, but it also doesn’t happen by accident. Why this has been such a tricky subject for me is that while I love diversity – I attended Brown for the specific purpose of challenging my up-till-then established belief system by meeting people who were different than me – forcing diversity doesn’t lead to greater diversity. 

We need to attack the lack of diversity at its source and chip away it brick by brick until we build systems and organizations that are diverse not by edict, but have organically evolved to attract diverse candidates and become colorblind when it comes to promotions, assignments and special projects. If PVD and other organizations attack diversity in such manner we’ll see a community much more engaged with its police force and a police force more in tune with the needs of its constituents.

Don Roach is still a Young Republican. Please check out Don’s Facebook page.

 

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