NCJ Number
81654
Journal
Police Magazine Volume: 5 Issue: 2 Dated: (March 1982) Pages: 8-13,16-21
Date Published
1982
Length
12 pages
Annotation
The requirements of affirmative action in police hiring and promotion are explained, and problems experienced by police agencies in their implementation are examined, with particular attention to the experiences of the Memphis Police Department (Tenn.).
Abstract
A 1972 amendment to the 1964 Federal Civil Rights Act prohibits local and State governments from discriminating in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Guidelines for the law's implementation were issued in 1978 by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. The guidelines indicate that any employment recruitment practice that has an 'adverse impact' on women or any race or ethnic group is illegal, unless the employer can show that the employment practices are directly related to prospective employees' ability to do the job. 'Adverse impact' has been interpreted by the courts to mean that a recruitment, testing, or promotion practice fails to attract members of minority groups or women in numbers equivalent to their representation in the local labor force. Many of the court orders and consent decrees -- settlements in which defendants agree to remedy the effects of discrimination without admitting any guilt -- demand that police departments achieve goals and quotas within 3 to 5 years. Police administrators, who are concerned about hiring persons who will perform effectively, have been frustrated by a general inability to find hiring and promotion testing and evaluation practices that are considered job-related by the courts. The courts have tended to examine the outcome of the practices, i.e., whether or not they produce a sufficient number of hired and promoted women and minority members. Many departments have abandoned meaningful testing and are still having difficulty hiring a sufficient number of females and minorities, because there is not a sufficient number of applicants from these groups. The Memphis Police Department has succeeded in meeting the hiring quotas of its consent decree, even though many of the applicant requirements, for example, 2 years of college, cannot be shown to relate directly to job tasks. In practice, it appears to many police administrators that the right numbers are more important than procedures that will produce the most effective police force, without reference to race or sex.