Some our our commentors have suggested, and rightfully so, that a significant proportion of police misconduct can be attributed to minority hiring quotas forced upon municipalities.
First,allow me to offer this article,
"The Case Against Affirmative Action." Perhaps the most succinct judgement against affirmative action is voiced by the author at the end of his work,
"Martin Luther said that humanity is like a man mounting a horse who always tends to fall off on the other side of the horse. This seems to be the case with Affirmative Action. Attempting to redress the discriminatory iniquities of our history, our well-intentioned social engineers now engage in new forms of discriminatory iniquity and thereby think that they have successfully mounted the horse of racial harmony. They have only fallen off on the other side of the issue."
However, the question still remains as to whether or not various public agencies, such as the police, have suffered injury to personnel quality assurance issues through affirmative action.
I certainly believe so.
In fact I believe that the judges who have so arrogantly assumed the role of social engineers have not only fallen off the other side of the racial harmony horse, they then walked to the front of the animal and cut its throat. In this endeavor they were ably assisted by our nation's race pimps who applauded the loudest as the poor beast sank to its knees and wielded the sharpest knives as its carcass was cut up for dog food.
Let's take as an example the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department or MPD as reported in 1994 or thereabouts regarding the mentally incompetent female police officer hired by MPD. This was a person who would be in our school's "special" classes who supposedly passed a civil service test, graduated from a police academy and was issued a gun, which she then used to put a hole in her boyfriend. The black female was found to have an IQ below 75 and was therefore found mentally unfit to stand trial.
To gauge the effect of affirmative action one must not isolate it from the political system that created it; it is more than just affirmative action that gets these appalling people into our public service agencies. There are politicians, bureaucrats, professors, teachers, union officials, community organizers - literally a cast of tens of thousands who share in the destruction of what was once one of the world's finest civil service systems.
Nothing may better demonstrate the destructive power of bad law and corrupt politicians than the effect of the election of Marion Barry as Mayor of Washington, DC. Indeed, to encounter a more gut-wrenching reversal of a municipality's fortunes one must to travel to Detroit. In either case, we are witnessing weapons grade stupidity, incompetence and malfeasance. To quote the
National Review :
[...] In 1978, Barry was elected mayor. He had an animus against the police force, based not just on the jaywalking incident, but also on a perverse view of law enforcement in general. He viewed the police not as a force city politicians were supposed to improve and reinforce, but as an "occupation army" (as he once put it) that must be restrained. One of his top goals as mayor was to shrink the police department. Within eight years, he had chopped it down more than 25 percent, to 3,800 officers. The police force began to rot from within as well. Training virtually halted. Equipment problems became so severe that police cruisers used tires discarded by the Park Police. Many of the best officers grew demoralized and quit, and the mayor made sure they weren't replaced. He lorded over the police, insisting that he approve every promotion above the rank of captain. Choking on patronage, the department became a personal security force that facilitated Barry's own crimes (though these were eventually exposed). Most infuriating of all, from a law-enforcement standpoint, was how Barry reveled in this dubious achievement: The downfall of the police was marketed as uplift of the people. The only thing that went up, however, was the crime rate. Barry seemed unconcerned. "I'm not going to let murder be the gauge since we're not responsible for murders, can't stop the murders," he said in 1989.
Yes you can - New York City did. NYPD reduced their homicides from a high of 2,154 in 1991 to 419 last year.
What is far more difficult to stop is political corruption. Looking at the NR paragraph, what current administration comes to mind? What Marion Barry did on the local level, Obama is doing nation-wide.
