Say Anything Blog

Sigh...

Fargo Forum - In a city with an overwhelmingly white population, Terry Thomason received a few extra looks when he hit the streets in a Fargo police uniform in 2001.

But he said the most startled reactions came from a couple of people who were black.

“They were pretty surprised, (like) ‘Wow, there’s a black police officer in Fargo,’ ” said Thomason, a 35-year-old West Fargo resident.

As the Fargo-Moorhead area slowly grows more racially diverse, a trend the U.S. Census confirms, its police and sheriff’s agencies are struggling – and failing – to keep pace.

Agencies across the country face the same challenge, but in some ways the departments in Fargo-Moorhead deal with more obstacles, say police chiefs and recruiting experts.

Racial and ethnic diversity within law enforcement agencies – the desire to reflect the demographics of the communities they police – is invaluable, say law enforcement and community leaders.

“It’s a statement that indeed everyone has ownership in the city,” said Scott Knight, police chief in Chaska, Minn., and immediate past president of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association.

Citizens often get their first impression of a community and local government through police contact, said Felipe Ortiz, a federal officer in Las Vegas who is president of the National Latino Peace Officers Association.

The feeling from that contact is crucial to the success of crime prevention programs that depend on cooperative residents, Ortiz said. If people don’t trust the police, they’re not going to help, he said.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have a hard time trusting people who consider things like skin color when making hiring decisions. This is overly-P.C. nonsense and has no place in any job environment, but most especially it doesn't have a place in the hiring of people as important to public safety as police officers.

When I see an officer on patrol I assume that this officer was hired because he/she was the most qualified individual available for the job. I don't want to look at the officer and wonder if there might have been somebody better or more qualified to be out on the street protecting myself and my family. Yet when police departments (or any organizations doing hiring) cater to a desire to create a "sense of diversity" hiring based on merit obviously has to take a back seat.

Unfortunately to the detriment of public safety, in the instance of police hiring. Which isn't to suggest that any of the officers in Fargo are necessarily bad at their jobs, I'd just rather know that they got them based on merit rather than skin color.

Hiring based on race to create diversity is just as silly as hiring based on race to create a lack of diversity. Common sense tells us that, if equality is the goal, race shouldn't even enter into the equation because when you start making judgments based on race you're always going to leave good, perfectly qualified people out in the cold.