Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is trying to “diversify” the LAPD, and she wants to make it easier for recruits who fail to qualify for training to make the grade in order to do so.
A summary of Bass’ public safety goals indicates Bass wants to remove “obstacles,” while one provision of her program states a deputy mayor will work with a “third party” to “evaluate the personnel process and identify obstacles to entry for recruits who fail to qualify for training,” Fox News reported. Recommendations for getting rid of said obstacles will get special consideration if they relate to “ethnic groups disproportionately left out of new officer training.”
“We think that particular provision or that goal or that idea is dangerous,” Tom Saggau, the spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said, adding, “If you have police officers that can’t make minimum qualifications or attained minimum standards, for instance, there are recruits that have been in the academy that just can’t score the minimum requirements for a physical fitness test. One hundred is the maximum score, 50 is acceptable. There are folks that are scoring under 10. That’s just dangerous.”
The provision states that recommendations to remove any obstacles will be taken into consideration, especially with those related to “ethnic groups disproportionately left out of new officer training.”
Saggau noted that recruits failing training might not “possess the mental fitness or the physical fitness ability to be a police officer.”
“That’s just a recipe for disaster,” he declared. “So we think lowering standards is a dangerous precedent.”
Bass stated last week at a graduation at the Police Academy, “As your mayor, I want you to know I have committed to ensuring that you have the tools and the resources you need to be effective, and that includes making sure graduations like these have more graduates in those seats. I have committed to hiring more officers.”
When in Congress, Bass authored the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which intended to give funds to the NAACP, ACLU, and National Urban League in order to study “management and operations standards for law enforcement agencies, including standards relating to administrative due process, residency requirements, compensation and benefits, use of force, racial profiling, early warning and intervention systems, youth justice, school safety…”
That act also assumed that a disparate impact by race or sex among traffic stops by policemen would be considered evidence of racial profiling.
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