In the aftermath of the Grand Jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, began the most predictable riot in US history. Everyone knew, as soon as the decision not to indict was released (and let’s be honest, we all kind of knew that would be the decision), that the city would burn, and sure enough, it did. The riots seemed to take on an air of a Thanksgiving Day football game; much anticipated, scheduled in advance, and sure to provide moments of high drama.
One of the surprising moments of riot drama that I observed was how many white people were rioting. There seemed to be an abnormal amount of white guys with Guy Fawkes masks (or should I call them V for Vendetta masks? The trademark and profits from their sale go to Time Warner) running around causing mayhem. I suppose one can look at that as a sign of racial progress, a racial riot with multiracial participants. And also a bit of irony. White guys helping to burn down black and minority businesses because…racism. Go figure.
So the other shoe had finally dropped. No one was satisfied and no one would have ever been satisfied. Even if Wilson had been indicted we would have spent two years fighting the same battles over and over, and Wilson would have most likely been acquitted, and everyone who said they would be satisfied with an indictment, and an arrest, and a trial, would still not be satisfied, just like with George Zimmerman.
Back in August I wrote about the immediate fallout from the Michael Brown shooting and suggested that the real solution to Black distrust of White cops was…more black cops. Well apparently that was an issue that local police departments in the Central Florida area have been struggling with for years. Apparently qualified minority candidates are much sought after, and hard to attract. The Daytona Beach News Journal did a story on just that issue:
In South Daytona, Wright realizes his agency does not reflect the city’s population, where 1,034 of the 13,177 residents are black, according to the most recent Census figures.
“Qualified minority applicants go to the larger agencies that offer more support, more equipment and more opportunities for advancement and specialization,” Wright said recently. “We try to capitalize on being a small department, but it just doesn’t pan out.”
Wright’s department has 28 sworn positions and three part-time officers. He said he just can’t compete with the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office or Daytona Beach Police Department when it comes to pay scale or opportunities for advancement.
Administrators in larger departments also realize the scope of the problem. Volusia County’s population tops 500,000, with a black population of 11 percent, or 55,088. And while the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office has 455 sworn law enforcement officers, just 17 — or 3.7 percent — are black.
The agency has more Hispanic officers than black officers — 32, or 7 percent — but that is still below the countywide Hispanic population of 12 percent. Deltona, a city of 86,290 that contracts with the Sheriff’s Office for law enforcement, has a Hispanic population of 26,060, or 30.2 percent.
So Black police candidates are attracted to larger departments where pay, benefits, and opportunities to advance are greater. Then who are the white guys filling the ranks of small departments?
What can we do to increase the number of Black and Hispanic candidates?
The Volusia sheriff mentioned a sponsorship program through his office that will pay candidates who fit certain financial criteria to attend police academy. The agency does its best to advertise the program — something that has not been lost on the Volusia County Hispanic Association.
“We try to make people aware of the opportunity, so they can apply and train for the sponsorship,” Volusia County Hispanic Association spokeswoman Emma Santiago said. “It would be great to reflect the makeup of the community, but we want the best qualified to fill those positions.”
So it sounds like they are going all out for qualified minority candidates, so why don’t we have all of the Black and Hispanic law enforcement officers we need?
The applicant pool of qualified minorities “has been disappointingly small,” sheriff’s spokesman Gary Davidson said in a written response to questions. “When it comes to minority candidates, the reality is that all of the agencies essentially are competing with each other for the same applicant pool.”
This point, that there a tiny pool of “qualified applicants” isn’t otherwise explained, but it appears to be the real issue to why my idea of Black communities being policed by Black police officers, isn’t likely to ever happen. One assumes that Law Enforcement faces similar problems to the military when it comes to recruiting; performance on standardized testing, non obese, with no criminal record… apparently people who can meet these simple qualifications are becoming a smaller and smaller part of the potential hiring pool.
So increasingly, and with the help of friendly SJW’s in Guy Fawkes masks, Black America will feel like they are living under occupation. And as their feelings for, and reactions to, law enforcement become increasingly negative, that will become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Mike Street Station 
The Army has a similar problem, combat arms units are mostly white. The more elite a combat unit is the whiter it gets. SF units are 97% white. This is despite years of actively recruiting minorities. I’ve had one retired Green Beret state that it didn’t seem right that they had to give black applicants swimming lessons. They still had to pass the swimming test. In case you were wondering, whites concentrate in combat arms, intelligence, and aviation. Blacks are primarily in supply, personnel, and food services.
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Traditionally, Blacks looked upon military service as career oriented from the beginning, so it made sense to migrate to military occupational specialties that were more like traditional jobs; service support in military speak. People enlisting in combat arms or intelligence often went in with the intention of staying one enlistment and getting out, with college money and the man-card stamped.
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Yes, I’ve read that. But, if you are interested, if you qualify, and if you want a military career, SF would be the way to go. Most of the slots in the SF battalions are E-7, E-8, and E-9. If you are not a SFC when you become a Green Beret, you soon will be. This is done for two reasons, higher pay will get them to stick around, and they won’t get messed with when they have to deal non-SF Army personnel.
Where did that last line in my comment come from? I didn’t put that in there.
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Well there aren’t very many people who could qualify for SF, so unless you have some reason to think you are really exceptional, I don’t think SF is a career you can plan for.
As for the comment, I wrote it for another reply and somehow it ended up in your comment. Don’t know how it happened but it’s corrected.
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“I suppose one can look at that as a sign of racial progress, a racial riot with multiracial participants”
Now that’s hilarious, even if the topic is anything but hilarious.
Re the white police depts, you see the same situation in the staffing of inner city schools where teachers & administrators are predominantly white and the student bodies predominantly black and hispanic. This has always surprised me as education degrees are one of the easiest to obtain, with high grade inflation.
My sister has a theory that the education system has gone down the drain because all the brilliant women who, generations ago, could be nothing but teachers, nurses, or secretaries, can now fan out into more lucrative positions, leaving the not so brilliant women to fill their spots in the classroom. My mother was in the last generation where women had fewer choices and she did indeed become a teacher and later a principal. Her sister was denied entrance to med school- she swears due to her gender- and instead became a nurse & pathologist. Were they both born today I doubt either would go into teaching or nursing.
Anyway, you see the same phenomena with blacks who manage academic achievement. They get snatched up by top law firms, top corporations, etc. because these entities are salivating to look diverse. A highly educated or qualified black person isn’t going to waste their time teaching in a crappy school or working for a podunk police department because their opportunities, in the current political climate, stretch well beyond that.
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Your sister’s idea isn’t crazy. I’ve heard that theory before and it makes sense. The best and brightest women 60 years ago might have been teachers. Now they would be on a corporate, scientific, or academic fast track. Meanwhile Education colleges seem to have the lowest standards of any college in a typical university. Sorry Education majors, but you know it’s true. Most of the Education majors I knew in college had flunked out of some other program, and education was their path to stay in school and get a degree.
And it shows.
And it makes sense again when referring to the pool of qualified minority candidates being, “disappointingly small.” If you qualify for the mental standards to be a police officer, if you’re a minority, you probably can get financial help to college. In an affirmative action world you get pushed upwards and upwards to your level of incompetence, just as “The Peter Principle” predicted so many decades ago.
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I know as a black girl going through higher education, I was pushed to do many different careers I didn’t want. Teaching was a big thing. I definite knew I hated kids and told people that constantly. They said well teaching is rewarding and we need more black teachers. I told them I don’t think I had more than 5 black teachers in my life so what is the difference. And I should say none of my scholarships were race based. I didn’t grow up in an inner city like people think all black people do. Even with racial incentives, people still have racial biases. I don’t know if I was ever turned down for a job or program because I was black since I have know way of knowing for sure. I know being black is never a plus in life.
Anyway about the cops, I know I don’t trust them. I think everyone knows cops can do whatever they want since they cover for each other. It is just like the military and all other fraternity style organizations. I’m always amazed at women joining the military. They know if they get raped or assaulted in some way that the system doesn’t care. Why put yourself in that situation? I know that my whole goal was to keep out of small town America since low diversity usually means problems for minorities. I’m sure that is what all those minority cops are thinking as well. I ended up in Kansas recently so I’m definitely trying to get out to a nice big suburb.
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I can’t speak for fraternities, but I honestly just can’t buy the pop culture view of the military as rapey central. I spent many years in the military, I met my wife there, and it’s just not a drunken frathouse that the media tries to portray. In fact, I’m not even sure that drunken frathouses are as bad as the media is trying to present. The UVA rape case seems to be falling apart, and that has been major news for weeks before anyone challenged it.
So in short, when the media wants me to hate an institution, I have to look at their motives.
I don’t disagree that cops will cover for each other. And there are bad cops. But I don’t think that’s typical. And I don’t even think that’s typical of their interactions with Black people, otherwise incidents like Garner or Brown would be in the hundreds per day. And at least in the case of Brown, it seems like story turned out to be nothing like it was presented on day one. The Garner story is a bit more problematic, but I’m unclear on the reasons for not indicting for something because the Grand Jury evidence hasn’t really been released.
I find it interesting that you find small town America as a danger zone. Is that based on experience? I mean since you’ve been in Kansas, you feel threatened? That’s funny since my impressions about what a good place to live is totally opposite of yours. You consider “low diversity” as meaning problems for you, but there are sociological studies which show the opposite, that “high diversity” communities have low public trust.
Interesting…
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I feel that any organization with “tradition/codes/honor” will go to any length to cover themselves. That is just history. Women and minorities had/have to fight for equal rights in these type of institutions all the time. They just let gay people be openly in the military. That signals to me as an environment I wouldn’t want to be in.
It is the same in small towns. I live in a small suburb now but any time I’ve been in other smaller places around here I get stared at as soon as I get out of my car. I was taught that staring is rude but it’s not the case here I guess. People from here tell me that they just are not used to seeing new people around. Personally it makes me uneasy. You don’t know what they are thinking. In bigger places no one cares anything about you and I feel better in that situation. I’ve had friends say they have (white) friends say people have said racist comments made to them about minorities by strangers. They seemed surprised but I’m not. I know having a half black president has brought out the crazies.
As for the recent killings, I haven’t paid attention to the details. I’m not surprised though. The fact that cops harass, beat, kill black people isn’t something that is going to be regularly reported to other law enforcement or in the media. It’s just like Ray Rice knocking out his wife. No one cared until they saw the video. Then, they cared about the few cases around the same time. I’m sure football players have been beating their wives/girlfriends/children all last season as well but no one cared. All of a sudden it is a problem in America “now”. As if that is a new thing. The weird thing was that some of the cases has NFL security consulted before the police were called. They are used to covering these things up and they have a protocol already in place.
I don’t know all the details of all the killings recently but I’m not surprised.
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Ha! You’re like the anti-me.
You seem to hate and distrust organizations that have “tradition/codes/honor” but those organization aren’t all about the code red. I think honor is an admirable thing, but I realize that is an atavistic notion which, as you demonstrate, isn’t appreciated or respected in these days and times.
And at the same time, places where no one knows you or cares anything about you seem to be appealing to your sensibility. So the concept of “community” is at best alien to you. Just saying, but that’s not a common trait.
Cops killing black people isn’t exactly being covered up. I guess if you have not been following these stories that may not be hitting your level of awareness, but it seems that they are instantly drawing media attention. There have been protests going on all over the country about it, so it’s not being brushed under the rug.
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I just don’t feel that tradition has anything to do with me. There aren’t any old ways that benefit me. Even with cops killing black people nowadays, it is probably more illegal now than it has ever been in American history. The media attention is random. It’s not like this is the first case of things like that in the last year. It’s just a popular news story at that moment so several stories come out.
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Well about 400 or so people are killed by cops in the US every year, so that’s more than one a day. But only a very few become national stories. Why that is I’m not sure, but it seems to have something to do with the stories that civil rights organizations want to highlight. In other words, the ones that Al Sharpton gets involved with. The problem is that Sharpton isn’t very good at picking the best cases that would make his point.
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What’s funny is that people her complain that the small towns are dying because of lack of jobs and young people leaving. But, they don’t want new people coming in. I worked with someone who moved to KS from TX (white guy). He raised his children here and he is grandparent age now (I don’t know if he has grandkids). He told me when I got here that people still think of him as “not from around here”. I would think living in a place for 30+ years would make you part of the community.
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