Police Departments Seek To Attract New Recruits With Less Qualifiers: Report

A mandate to diversify amid bad press and a slew of vacancies led some police forces to relax their rules for new recruits, the New York Times reported Monday. Some have changed their hiring practices to be more inclusive.

Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and now a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told the Associated Press last year that the lack of police recruits was a “national crisis.”

“For the first time in my life, I would say I could never recommend the job,” he said. “Who’s going to put on a camera, go into urban America where people are going to critique every move you make? You’re going to be demonized.”

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According to the Times, New Orleans wouldn’t automatically disqualify new recruits for prior heroin or crack use. Prior recreational drug use was allowed as long as there was no marijuana for two years and no harder drugs for 10 years. Aurora, Colorado no longer used a military-style running test. Kentucky State Police announced this month that recruits no longer need to have two years of college credit.

“What I don’t want you to misunderstand here is thinking that we’re lowering our standards by any means,” Kentucky State Police Sergeant Brad Arterburn said to the Lexington Herald Leader. “We’re not lowering our standards. What we’re doing is broadening the pool that we have to choose from.”

In Philadelphia, recruits had to be at least 19 years old and have 60 college credits or more. CBS reported in January that after changing the requirement to being 22 years old and requiring no college credit, the police force received 20 percent more applicants at the beginning of 2017.

“We want the community and the police department to reflect what we have here demographically, and that’s what we work with every single day,” Philadelphia Police Sergeant Robert Ryan told CBS. “We are working with different communities to sort of get the word out there to say ‘we want you to join.”

Several high-profile police shootings increased both police scrutiny and calls for police to look more like the communities they are policing.

“In the past, recruitment has been based on a 1950s model: six feet tall, right out of the military,” said John Lozoya a senior commander with the St. Paul, Minnesota Police Department to the New York Times. “But as we’ve evolved as a society, we realize we’re not like that. We had to look at our hiring practices. We had to adapt.”

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Lozoya’s police force has also changed its written tests, looking to avoid bias against recruits who have had trouble mastering English and focus more on community engagement and the ability to de-escalate.

The Times reported that the New York City Police Department working to diversify allowed Sikh officers to wear turbans and short beards, and that the Detroit Police Department now allows beards for men and studs for women.