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Recruitment: Police Department Issues & the Los Angeles Community   Term Paper ID:27703 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Discusses erosion of public confidence in the police department due to racial & other tensions. Examines viability of testing for racist attitudes & methods of weeding out poor candidates & officers.... More...

7 Pages / 1575 Words 3 sources, 7 Citations, APA Format $28.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Discusses erosion of public confidence in the police department due to racial & other tensions. Examines viability of testing for racist attitudes & methods of weeding out poor candidates & officers. Paper Introduction: Recruitment: Police Department Issues and the Los Angeles Community Introduction Recent stories in the Wall Street Journal have reflected the problems being faced in the public sector with particularly difficult jobs such as that of the police. One of the consequences of the O.J. Simpson trial -- coming as it did after the Rodney King incident and several other incidents in California and elsewhere -- has been a further erosion of public confidence in the police department, and this has been met by political leaders with attempts to gain more control over the police in order to reduce problems. Trouble With Validity and Reliability in Psychological Tests for Raci Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Affirmative action was always opposed bitterly by whiteofficers and their unions, and this meant that the black officers who werehired started out in some opposition to their union. Theuse of these tests was in answer to a pledge to do something about theproblem of racism and brutality among some police officers: Detecting racism in police ranks--and preventing the brutality that can accompany it--was declared a top priority by police chiefs nationwide after the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King in 1991 by white Los Angeles police officers. The differencebetween the private sphere and the public sphere in this regard is thatwhen the police accept unqualified applicants, what is at stake is publicsafety, while when the private sector accepts less qualified applicants,what is at stake is productivity. Labor relations in thepolice department today often involve not only clashes between union andmanagement but also between divisions within the union and the union atlarge, and black officers constitute a group that is often at odds with thelarger union. The tensions are thus not just between labor and management but betweenlabor factions set one against the other. A psychologist with the firmstates that there is no test for racism, but the MMPI can detectcharacteristics such as resentment, anger, and low self-esteem. it may have reduced it, but it has noteliminated it. Black officers note that what they believed about overcomingentrenched racial attitudes in the police departments of the nation waswrong and that it will take longer than thought to change those attitudesand to weed out the old and bring in the new. Recruitment: Police Department Issues and the Los Angeles CommunityIntroduction Recent stories in the Wall Street Journal have reflected the problemsbeing faced in the public sector with particularly difficult jobs such asthat of the police. In addition, black officers have charged that thesepsychological tests have been so subjective that they have been used todiscriminate against minorities, making the instrument itself racist. If the tests do not weed out theseofficers, what good are the tests? Assuming these figures are correct--and critics say they are not--police departments are still unwilling to reject so many applicants. However, the mere act of hiring alarger number of black officers does not solve the problem of racism in thepolice department and does not create an equal playing field for the blackswith respect to the whites in the police department. the unfortunate consequences of these tests, as noted, isthat they often keep out minority applicants because the standards forscoring overlook cultural differences. (8 September 1995). Indeed, it is pointed outthat when questions directly about race are asked, anyone who is a racistcan easily avoid answering in a way that would reveal their true attitudes,making such tests useless in determining anything. Theissue is exacerbated by the fact that there are other minority groupsinteracting with the police as well. Simpson trial --coming as it did after the Rodney King incident and several other incidentsin California and elsewhere -- has been a further erosion of publicconfidence in the police department, and this has been met by politicalleaders with attempts to gain more control over the police in order toreduce problems.Trouble With Validity and Reliability in Psychological Tests for RacistAttitudes The police problems of greatest import in recent years have centeredon issues of race. Simpson. (11 September 1995). Police unions support the applicants in many cases, and many rejectedapplicants can hire their own psychologists to retest them. The number and influence of black officers has increasedconsiderably since the beginning of efforts at integration, and since 1972the number of black officers nationwide has doubled to more than 6 , .Between 1982 and 1992, the 5 largest police departments saw an increase inblack officers by an average of 36 percent. When theseare in a person of low to moderate intelligence, they are likely toindicate an inability to work with minorities. (7 September 1995). The riots in Los Angeles shouldhave awakened everyone to the depth of the problem and to the need to solveit, but the methods undertaken to do so have not been very effective. Thismeans that even where these tests are applied and accepted, most policepsychologists fail only 15 to 2 percent of police applicants. One lawyer believes therewill be more reverse-discrimination cases as white officers challengeaffirmative action programs as being unfair to whites. Other police departments around the country also beefed up their psychological screening. Lambert (1995) writes about the use of psychologicaltests to weed out police who may have psychological problems that couldcreate further problems for their departments, and yet it seems that thesetests are no more effective in making labor decisions than earlierinstruments have been. Blacks claim that management is against them as welland that they are more likely to be given dangerous assignments, and thereis some statistical evidence that this is correct. It was believed that an increasednumber of black offices working alongside the white officers would reduceor eliminate this problem. Critics cite the fact that the use of such testshas not accomplished the desired result of weeding out those who may beracist or who may use excessive force. Many officers areindeed worrying that the gains that have been made could be lost in theface of the growing opposition to affirmative action programs and anysimilar program intended to increase the number of minority members indifferent institutions. The private sector is turning downapplicants not because of psychological testing but because privatecompanies do not want to spend more on training and want people alreadyskilled in the necessary functions.Conclusion The issue of racist attitudes in the police department has become morevital as it has become more apparent to the public, and this has happenedbecause of Rodney King and O.J. Kaufman and Gaiter (1995) note that many minority police do notbelieve that their own police force supports them, and they believe thatthey trail in assignments, promotions, and respect and continue to do so inspite of the gains made elsewhere in society. Private companies are faced with some of these same issues, especiallythe issue of whether affirmative action is beneficial or harmful, whetherracial tensions will develop in the workplace, and whether industry anymore than public administration can afford to reject as many applicants assomething like psychological testing might indicate should be rejected.Narisetti (1995) writes that manufacturers are worried about having toreject many applicants because while there is a shortage of workers, thereis also a shortage of workers with the needed skills. For instance, Stanford & Associates in Chicago conducts testingto ascertain racist attitudes on the part of police; they use the MinnesotaMultiphasic Personality Inventory to do it, a true-or-false test of 567questions that asks nothing about race. In terms of the application of thesetests to police departments, research suggests that the effectiveness ofsuch testing at most police departments is questionable.Psychological Fitness and Hiring Practices One accounting shows that of 1 , police applicants from 199 to1992, it was concluded that 9 percent had personality and psychologicalcharacteristics that made them unfit to be police--5 percent were overlyaggressive, 33 percent were overly defensive, and 5 percent had lied onthe test. The idea is clearly good -- to developa means of identifying which officers might present problems in the future. (Lambert, 1995, 1)Certainly, it was hoped that the use of these tests would identifyindividuals who might be racist before they could do any damage, but asLambert (1995) notes, all psychological tests face the inherent problem ofreliability. White patrolling high-crime black areas come to believe that allblacks are suspect. Because of this, psychologicalevaluation has been used to keep minorities and women off the police force,as the courts have found in several cases (Lambert, 1995).Racial Conflicts Between Officers on the Police Force Minorities face a number of problems in the police ranks, and this isone area of labor relations where the consequences can be harmful tosociety. This optionhas been criticized in Los Angeles as a loophole allowing the unqualifiedto slip through. Psychological testing is used in the private sector as well, though itis usually not shaped so as to identify this sort of specific attitude butmore to general psychological health. "Psychological Tests Designed to Weed Out Rogue Cops Get a 'D.'" Wall Street Journal , 1, 7.Narisetti, Raju. Often whathappens is that there are officers from the same police department facingone another in court over discrimination or reverse discrimination charges. ReferencesKaufman, Jonathan and Dorothy J. This has complicated laborrelations and has also created new reasons for division. One of the consequences of the O.J. A commission appointed to investigate the Los Angeles police recommended that officers be retested for psychological problems every three years. This can be particularly important when it comes to rootingout racist attitudes because such attitudes may be deeply ingrained anddifficult to spot. In Los Angeles, the Latino communityis largely ignored in spite of its prominence and size. Yet it does not seem that such an instrument exists, and indeed it may notbe possible to develop an instrument that can accomplish this task. Race relations arelargely thought of in terms of black and white relations. By the Mid-197 s,most black officers had stopped participating in the existing unions andhad started their own black fraternal groups. There have beenaggressive efforts to increase the number of blacks in the policedepartments of the nation going back as far as the 196 s. "Many Minority Police Doubt that the Force is Really with Them." Wall Street Journal, 1, 8.Lambert, Wade. In the last decade there havebeen black police chiefs in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago,Houston, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Gaiter. Latinosconstitute another important minority facing the same need to become moreprominent in the police department while also having to face the fact thatthat alone may not suffice to solve the problem and eliminate racism. A report by a community group known as Police Watch that monitorscomplaints of police misconduct in Los Angeles County shows that there hasbeen no diminution in complaints after these tests were instituted. Kaufman and Gaiter (1995) note that white officers and black officerscome from different backgrounds, with many white officers coming fromconservative, working-class backgrounds where they had little contact withblacks. The tests usuallyinclude safeguard questions that are designed to detect dishonesty, butcritics say applicants can still fool the test. At that time,many police departments were openly racist and had officers who were openlyracist in their speech and attitudes. "Manufacturers Decry a Shortage of Workers While Rejecting Many." Wall Street Journal , 1, 7. The questions on the tests do not ask about race directly for the mostpart, and instead psychologists ask questions that look for certainpersonality characteristics that they believe are likely to indicate racistattitudes. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.