Increasing representation of blacks in the NYPD Police

After submitting my first draft of the paper myself, these were the critiques my professor gave me: “The largest weakness in your documents is that you do not identify a real problem (with an action forcing event and data to prove that there is a problem).  You mention a lot of issues, but there is no clear logic in solving a problem. Is the problem police violence against minority communities?  If so, there are a huge range of solutions not related to representative bureaucracy.   Representative bureaucracy is the concept that when providing a service to a community, the government officials who provide the service to the community should reflect the demographics of the community. The alignment is supposed to generate actions with greater understanding of the community.    If the problem is a human resources problem of the police department.

Description

That the officers are not representative of the population that they are serving (the problem of representative bureaucracy).  Then, for the problem, you need to have a recent action forcing event. Reason why the problem needs to be solved now).  Would you say that the police’s heavy hand during the spring demonstrations resulted from too little diversity in the police force?.  What is the problem that “low level of diversity” is causing?.   Then, you need to discuss all the policies in past years, to hire more Black and Hispanic officers. This would be a timeline of policies, from when the force was entirely white men to now (when it is surely mixed by race and gender). What are the percentages by decade:  1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020?.

This will show the progress of the increasing diversity of the NYPD officers. And each decade may have policies that encouraged more diversity. Now, we have to say that the current diversity is not enough (compared to %s in the population? . I know that you have some information along these lines buried in your documents, but it is not front and center.    By the way, much of the increase in diversity is attributes to John Jay College and the policy that create it.  Namely, that as societies are more complicated (and diverse), police officers need a wider education in sociology, psychology, economics, etc. (associates degrees, BA/BS, MA/MPA)  to understand the communities that they are serving.

It is not an accident that diversity increased during the years that JJAY was building up its programs for police officers.  It was thought that officers with more education would understand their communities better.  And the last commissioner was a JJAY MPA graduate !!!   For solutions, you need specific new laws

Attached Files

Download  |