Race matters: The paradox of race in police personnel decisions.

摘要

Race has been called the American dilemma, and that dilemma is particularly acute in the context of law enforcement. There is a critical paradox of race in policing, a recognition of its unavoidable salience in the face of formal legal prohibitions. In spite of constitutional and statutory law which advance race-neutral principles in public employment, police administrators have been unable to escape the socio-political reality which compels consideration of race. This project explores this paradox by examining how police officials, both past and present, perceive race to matter to law enforcement and what policies and practices they have devised to take race into account.; Against the background of the societal, political and legal forces behind the changing face of policing, I examine this tension between formal EEO law and police ideology and practice both over time (1964 to the present) and within a contemporary police department. The historical analysis focuses on broad shifts over time while the contemporary analysis focuses on variation among police officers by rank, job tenure, and ethnicity.; My study, which is both historical and ethnographic, implicates three distinctive methodologies: archival data collection, interviews, and field observation. I first confirm the enduring salience of race by examining the justifications used by police commissioners, police chiefs and higher-level officers for taking race into account in recruiting, hiring, promoting and making assignments. I also establish the legally proscriptive side of the paradox by discussing the constitutional and statutory standards which prohibit the use of race in public employment decisions. I then show how the ideology of race and racism has changed from 1964 to present and how those changes affect the way in which the paradox is resolved. I explore how shifts in legal doctrine about the permissible uses of race in employment produce changes in ideology which impact formal policies and informal practices. I find that the blatant use of race in police personnel decisions in the 1960's and 70's has evolved into a far subtler, tacit use of race, a phenomenon that parallels the rise and fall of affirmative action and the increase in reverse discrimination lawsuits.