Affirmative Action

Affirmative action has been an issue for decades in law enforcement. Although there are many arguments both for and against, the overall effects have been documented, scrutinized, and followed for well over 30 years now. To understand how this can effect hiring and promotion practices in law enforcement, you must first understand what affirmative action is, and the point of view in favor of and in opposition to it.

Commonly, affirmative action is a civil rights rule premised on the concepts of human rights and egalitarianism results. Impartiality of consequences is dissimilar from equality of prospect as the former concentrates on comparable outcomes and the concluding focuses on removing discrimination from the progression of obtaining a job, a promotion, or some other communally preferred good or service.

The arguments for affirmative action justify a race and gender conscious approach to hiring in law enforcement. Affirmative action demonstrates a pledge to the standard of equal opportunity and provides thousands of jobs for racial minorities and women and lastly is believed to improve police community relations.

Arguments in opposition to affirmative action reside on its expenses and query the justice that purportedly goes with compensating members of a protected group for past injustices done to other members of the same collection throughout previous periods of the past. Affirmative action is believed by many to be nothing more than reverse discrimination. It is wrong for a police department to present privileged handling to members of a marginal group who are not themselves sufferers of discrimination in order to equalize past societal discrimination. Furthermore affirmative action has caused police administrators to lesser principles to hire racial minorities and women.

A revision of the fifty principal municipalities in the continental U.S. found that from 1979 to 2008, police departments made progress in the employment of African-American and Hispanic officers, but that the progress was slow and didn't really take off until the early 21st century, possibly due to a steady increase in affirmative action lawsuits. Today, minority police officers are populating about twenty five percent of the officers in all local police departments, and African-Americans head twelve to fourteen of the fifty top police departments. Females are unfortunately still underrepresented; though an additional problem is that female officers make up only a minuscule fraction of all supervisors in metropolis and state law enforcement agencies.