Pitfalls With Police Recruitment In The U.S.

Pitfalls With Police Recruitment In The U.S.

BY RACHEL CAIN at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/21/3799465/police-brutality-recruitment/

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Whenever police violence comes under national attention, better training is often advocated as a solution. Before the training even begins, though, departments have a major way to influence how they interact with their communities: who they accept as new recruits.

“The problem is we’ve been addressing the issues wrongly for years. We keep wanting to say it’s a training issue. It’s not a training issue,” Donald Grady II, a retired police chief who served for over 30 years, told The Atlantic. “This is an issue of who it is that we’ve decided we would allow to police our country.”

Grady mentioned that departments often prioritize recruits with aggressive personalities over those who are more docile. “Why are we hiring people to do policing because of their level of aggression?” he said. “I can teach you to be appropriately assertive. What I can’t do is pull unreasonably aggressive tendencies out of a person.”

Finding recruits with the right temperament is especially important now, as fewer and fewer people are seeking positions with the police force. In some parts of the country, applications have fallen by as much as 50 percent.

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