Well said Vet
Now let us talk about the other facts that they don’t talk about on the TV News.
I was in California when the Wattsriot occurred. Not one building standing as far as the eye could see. Blockafter block of businesses gone overnight.
Because these businesses were in high poverty high crime areas their businessinsurance was sky high and therefore many only had minimum coverage howevermost had no insurance at all. Most were just small mom and pop community businesses.
When all the smoke and news vans went away no one talked about all the locallyowned black business men that had been totally devastated by the riots. They losteverything that had worked for over the years overnight…and these businesses werenever rebuilt.

I have no problem with anyone marching on City Hall or Washington DChowever to injury someone or destroy a business of someone in your community isnot acceptable to me I don’t care how import you think your cause may be.

Here we are having thesesame discussions again and again.

I am a firm believer that the most qualified person should get the job.....period

Are they going to require that half the police force be female since this is areflection of the community also?
I don’t think so.

We have had severaldiscussion of this kind over the past 20 years concerning the need for diversityof teachers in the classrooms of our schools. Have they solved this problemyet? I don't think so..

Posted: 7:00 a.m. Sunday,Dec. 14, 2014

PUBLIC SAFETY

Minorities underrepresented in local policeagencies

By Josh Sweigart

Staff Writer

    Namron Bush’s young, black face stood outamong the crowd of white students who were repeating a police officer’s oath onstage.

    Bush, along with 20 others, was about tograduate from a peace officer training academy at Sinclair Community College inDayton on Tuesday and go on to seek jobs in law enforcement across southwestOhio.

    Police agencies across the region rarelyhire minorities like Bush. The area’s biggest police departments employ dozensof officers but often only a handful are black, Hispanic or Asian-American, andnone mirror the diversity of the community they patrol, the Journal-News found.

    After 18 weeks of training, Bush hopes tochange those numbers.

    “The more I’ve seen (in the national news),the more I kind of want to make the impact toward getting a positive image ofpolice officers, hopefully, encouraging other black men to even become policeofficers,” Bush said.

    In an era of growing mistrust betweenpolice and black residents because of high-profile incidents involving policewho have shot or strangled black men and children, that disparity is comingunder closer scrutiny.

    Officersacross the region say that they want a diverse workforce that looks like thecommunity but have trouble finding interested and qualified minority applicantswho want to join the force.

   “I don’t think there’s any doubt that there continues to be a challengefor law enforcement to recruit minority members,” Ohio Attorney General MikeDeWine told this newspaper. “It clearly needs to be dealt with.”

    But others argue police agencies are justnot doing enough to recruit minorities.

    “It’s a solvable problem,” said PatrickOliver, director of the criminal justice program at Cedarville Universityand a former police chief. Oliver added that police departments need to encouragechildren at a young age to think about becoming a cop.

    “Agencies need to do something different,”Oliver said. “If you do what you’ve always done before, you’re going to getwhat you’ve always gotten before.”

‘We make excuses’

    The city of Hamilton — which has a minority population of16 percent — will consider multiple factors, including race, when it hires atleast three new officers next year, Capt. Craig Bucheit told the Journal-News.

    Earlier this week, the city announced a newcommission that will study how Hamilton’scity departments can attract and hire more diverse employees at all levels ofgovernment. And, the city’s police department submitted an annual recruitmentplan that includes having the chief consider disparities between the city’sworkforce demographics and the police department’s racial composition whenhiring.

    Police officials are also pushing the cityto agree to give the agency’s police chief more power to pick from a wider poolof applicants. Currently, he can onlymake selections based on who scores in the top percentile on entry exams.

    “When the community looks to policeofficers and they see a reflection of themselves within the police force, Ithink that goes a long way to building and maintaining trust,” Bucheit said.

    Hamilton’s police forcedoesn’t look like the rest of the community, though. Of the 105 cops, fourblack and two Hispanic officers patrol the streets of this city, home to morethan 62,000.

    Bucheit said the department has troublefinding minorities who want to become officers. And, in the testing processother qualifications, such as if the officer speaks Spanish or has a bachelor’sdegree are more important than race.

    “The biggest challenge to hiring (diverseofficers) is making sure we have qualified people in the process from thebeginning,” Bucheit said. “The chief can’t hire someone who doesn’t show up andtake the test. We can recruit all we want, but if someone doesn’t show up andtake the test and put their name in, we can never hire them.”

    Council member Archie Johnson argues thecity’s lack of workplace diversity is a systemic failure and officials haven’ttried hard enough to find minorities to fill openings. He wants to see thepolice department seek out minority residents from across Hamilton to apply for positions.

    “A lot of people say, ‘they don’t apply,’”Johnson said of minorities. “(City officials) are not willing to cross the lineto make the difference. It’s easier to blame the applicants than it is to makethe effort. We make excuses.”

    Johnson, who has been outspoken about howminorities are treated in Hamilton, fears thecity would be ill-equipped to handle an event like the police shooting death ofunarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

Race relations in trouble?

    In addition to the Ferguson shooting,protests were sparked locally in August when a police officer shot and killedJohn Crawford III, a Fairfield man, while he strolled through a Walmart inBeavercreek with an air rifle in hand. Police mistook the item for a real gun.

    Televisions across the country haverecently shown videos of a 12-year-old boy at a Clevelandpark killed while playing with a toy gun and a man in New York City choked to death.

    All of the victims were black and theofficers were white.

The seriesof events has led some to question relations between cops and the communitiesthey police as well as the small number of black men and women serving thoseagencies.

    More than half of the blacks surveyed in aPew Research poll out this week said they anticipate race relations betweenpolice and the community will worsen within the next year; 34 percent of whitessaid the same.

    Even forces praised for their diversity,such as the Cincinnati Police Department where 30 percent of the officers areblack, still don’t represent what the community looks like. More than 44percent of the people living in Cincinnatiare black.

    Deep-seated racial homogeneity is moreprevalent in police forces across some of southwest Ohio’s suburbs.

    Middletown,West Chester and Fairfieldalso fail to employ the same percentage of minority police officers that areliving in the area.

    Out of the 87 police officers working for West Chester, which has a minority community of 23.6percent, one is Hispanic and one is black. In Fairfield, where 21 percent of the peopleidentify as minorities, two officers are black and the remaining 55 are white.

    Other areas, such as Liberty Township,are patrolled by the Butler County Sheriff’s Office and roughly six percent ofthe people working in that office are a minority. The agency was not able toimmediately provide a breakdown on race or the positions of those working intheir demographics analysis.

‘Make an impact’

    Police in Middletown, where more than 16 percent of thecommunity is a minority, say they know it’s a problem their force doesn’t looklike the rest of the population. 65 officers working for the force are white,four are black, one is Middle Eastern, another Japanese and one is Korean.

    But they also don’t know how to fix theproblem or why minorities don’t often apply for the positions, Deputy ChiefRodney Muterspaw said.

    “That’s a good question, we’ve asked thatquestion of ourselves,” Muterspaw said. “I don’t really know.”

    Because of budget constraints, he said thedepartment is limited to recruiting candidates that have already gone through apolice training academy on their own dime. They often look for recruits atSinclair or Butler Tech Development Schools.

Racialdiversity is slim there, too.

    Since 2012, Butler Tech has graduated 178students from its 17-week police training academy and 92 percent of thosecadets were white.

    He doesn’t have an answer but Muterspawwonders, though, if some black or Hispanic kids are turned off at an early agefrom becoming a cop because they see so few that look like them.

    “If you’re a young person growing up in anarea of town and you see the officer coming to your house is totally differentfrom you, you might think, ‘I’m not able to do that job,’” Muterspaw said.

    That’s an image Bush, the Sinclair graduatewho is now on the hunt for a job as a police officer, hopes to change.

    “I was laying on the couch, I was like,‘Man, I’m just tired of seeing all of this negative imagery of being a policeofficer.’ And I thought of how I could make an impact,” he said. “So, simplybecoming an officer and creating that positive imagery towards police officershelped me make that decision.”