MULTICULTURAL REPRESENTATION IN LAW ENFORCEMENT: RECRUITMENT, RETENTION, AND PROMOTION INTRODUCTION Multicultural is related to several cultures in society, and educational theory that encourages interest in many cultures within a society rather than a mainstream culture. The Impact of Cultural Diversity in law enforcement is hard to uphold, currently in law enforcement it’s hard to keep officers because of the lack of interest that goes on, pay grade, and taking too long to rank up within the field.
I notice the continuously open application for officers because of the employment. Recruitment for officers have slowed down as well, some departments are willing to take on people who just have a high school diploma. The recruitment and selection process of officers are intense. Every state and police department varies, in Albany, GA the police requirements are being at least 20 years old, High school diploma or GED required with no previous experience.
Have a Georgia valid driver license, U. S. itizenship, no felony, domestic violence convictions, or misdemeanor conviction involving moral turpitude. Pass the extensive drug/background check along with the psychological screening. Lastly, you must achieve and maintain the Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Depending on the agency that his or her are applying to could take up to 3 month to a year for a callback for an interview.
Usually local, and state enforcements are easier to get hired rather than federal. (Albany P. D. ).After the recruitment process is complete some people will be hired as an officer but first they have to go to police academy to be fully accepted in the department.
Police academy consists of in class training, on-site training, workout routines, drills, enforcement procedures and certification levels of enforcement. After the academy is completed the officers are fully trained and ready to work in their careers. Generally, officers that just got hired perform in ride along with other officers. It’s to the point at some jobs you have to be bilingual or have abundant amount of experience related to your field.
Stated from the text the book, diverse groups are hard to employ because of their sexuality, they could be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender with that being said anything can look good on paper but until they go into their interview process where there would be weeded out. The recruitment difficulties are always age, height, weight, drug use and criminal history, and education. It’s a big difficulty competing with other agencies due to the pay grade; state and local is way less than working for the federal.Any local, state, or federal recruitment use (8) strategies which are: commitment, planning, resources, selection and training of recruiters, recruiting incentives, community/military involvement, and internship, cadet, reserve, and academy programs. On page 87 in the text book of Multicultural Law Enforcement it’s broken down in more depth about the strategies. The economy has increased and decreased over the years creating the criminal justice scale to be better as the year progress.
Outside of the United States the Canadian population can be characterized as a multicultural and diverse system of individuals.There is little doubt that certain minority groups possess a lifestyle and pattern of behavior inviting conflict or confrontation with the police (Fleras & Elliot, 1996). In light of this confrontation, an increase can be seen in the number of Black individuals killed in comparison to Caucasian individuals by Canadian police officers. Specifically, in 1996 the Black Action Defense Committee of Toronto noted that there were more shootings of Black civilians in Toronto than in some larger American cities such as Los Angles.This is not proportional to the number of minority members of any given community, town or city.
Visible minorities are likely to be shot more often, and to be killed more often by white police officers. Further, at each trial no jury members serving on the jury were black, and after the verdicts of acquittal were given to the court no further attempts were made toward appeals in the cases. Systemic racism, or when racism is built into the fabric of any institution, operates within any given system independently. (Aylward, A. C. 999) In 1989, Cole Harbour High School students became concerned after a large brawl occurred, in which the police charged more black students than white students for fighting Black teens were also pepper sprayed during this incident.
Later, in 1991, Halifax bars refused entry of black patrons. In response to this the chief of police set up an ad hoc Incident Review Committee of both police & civilian members for allegations of racism or excessive force. Civilians also participate in sitting on the committee. (Aylward, A. C. 1999) Although it may appear that systemic discrimination and racism have decreased in recent ears, in reality, many minority individuals are negatively affected by the actions of the police, and the miscarriages of justice carried out in the Canadian court system even today.
Even though stringent guidelines are in place in the selection of juries for trial, it still remains that less minorities actually serve on Canadian juries despite efforts to counterbalance this blatant inequality. The outcome of this imbalance is an even larger gap, or imbalance in dealing with police officers accused of and charged for killing unarmed civilians.Fleras & Elliot, 1996) WORK CITED Aylward, A. C.
, The Canadian Critical Race Theory, 1999. Halifax: Ferneuld. Department, A. P. (2012, Janauary 10). Police Officer.
Retrieved January 10, 2012, from http://www. albany. ga. us/content/1804/default.
aspx: http://agency. governmentjobs. com/albany/default. cfm? action=viewjob&JobID=255782 Fleras, A.
, & Elliott, J. L. , Unequal Relations: An Introduction to Race, Ethnic and Aboriginal Dynamics in Canada. 1996. Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall.
