Yesterday, The Drudge Report highlighted a news report indicating that the Chicago Police Department may soon be the first in the country to eliminate police entrance examinations. Their reasoning?
Dropping the exam would bolster minority hiring and avert legal battles, according to one source, while others confirm that the exam could be scrapped to open the process to as many people as possible.
According to the article, this is the CPD’s second attempt to increase minority hiring. Their first effort involved offering the exam on the internet.
In another article on race, the Wall Street Journal reports that the country’s most liberal appellate court in the 9th Circuit recently overturned a 2000 court decision that found that preventing felons from voting did not violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The issues the ruling raises about racial bias in the justice system aren’t unique to Washington state, said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., group promoting sentencing reform. “They are issues that permeate the justice system and are relevant in every state,” he said.
In the 2-1 decision, the appellate judges concluded that “disparities in the state’s judicial system “[could] not be explained in any race-neutral way.”
In both these situations, the race card is being used as a ploy to get around the law. It is absolutely shameless. For now, let’s set aside the issue of the propriety of seeking to increase minorities in the police force to begin with. The question that remains then is, is there really no other way to increase the number of minority cops in Chicago short of entirely eliminating the entrance exam that screens potential cops on issues pertinent to their future position? And how insulting is it to suggest that the only way to help minorities is to not hold them to the standards everyone else is held to?
The same goes for Washington. The issue of whether people who have committed heinous crimes should be allowed to participate in the political system has no connection to race at all. To make it about race is to skirt around the issue. The lead attorney in the case, made the following statement.
“In this case, we have proved that the criminal justice system in this state is biased against African-Americans, and the impact has been a violation of their voting rights,” said Larry Weiser, a law professor at Gonzaga University School of Law who is the lead attorney in the lawsuit.
So, what’s the real problem here? That the system is biased against African-Americans? Or that it is a violation of prisoners’ rights to keep them from voting? These are two very separate issues that each raise their own questions, some of which have merit, but wrapping them in the cloak of the race card is futile.
In truth, neither of these situations is really about race. Making them about race just deflects attention from the real issues. It doesn’t help to get to the root of the problems, nor does it help the plight of minorities which just goes to show that no one wins by casually throwing around the race card.
