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Women and Minorities on the Police Force
| Article
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20436 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
3,292 Words |
| Author
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Edith E. Flynn
Edith E. Flynn is professor of criminal justice at
Northeastern University |
Policing in the United States is changing. Long-standing assumptions about the value of traditional approaches to law enforcement have now been seriously undermined, given the persistence of violence, crime, and drugs tearing at the fabric of society. To better meet the formidable challenge of these growing social problems, a new vision of policing is emerging. The new focus is on crime prevention problem solving, and the development of new partnerships between the police and the communities they serve. But implementation of problem-oriented community policing will not be easy. Police organizations are highly autonomous, hierarchical systems, well known for their resistance to change. Structural and legal constraints, vested interests, parochialism, and outright fear of change, have effectively raised a host of sociopolitical barriers to most reorganization efforts. To overcome these barriers, police will need to develop flexible organizational structures, innovative and proactive law enforcement strategies, and above all, upgrade the quality of its most important and valuable resource its personnel. It is the purpose of this article to briefly examine the critical issues of human resources management in policing and to focus in particular on the role of women and minorities in law enforcement.
Human resource management deals with issues such as: How well does a department selects, train, evaluate, promote, and support its employees? Do officers enforce the law equitably and impartially? Do officers protect the rights and dignity of every individual during the performance of their duties? Does the composition of the force adequately reflect the makeup of the community it serves? Are departmental policies and employment practices free of intentional and unintentional bias? How well these questions can be aswer5ed can provide much information about the quality of policing in particular departments.
America takes pride in its racial pluralism; the coexistence of many cultures, races, ethnicities, and religions is a hallmark of the great American experiment. However, along with the interracial and intercultural cooperation, racial, and gender discrimination also exists. Minorities and women, despite the efforts of the legal system continue to experience discrimination in the workplace. Since law enforcement mirrors society at large, it should not be surprising that racial and gender prejudice exist here too. And although many law enforcement agencies have made significant improvements in the hiring of minorities and women, problems of racism and gender bias continue, with predictable deleterious effects on police-community
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