A Personal Reflection Of The Norwood Police Department

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A. Desired Change

We are a forty-six man department. Our current make up is 45 white male officers and one female white officer. We police a community that is 17 % black and 5 % Hispanic. Also the people who travel through our community are quite diverse. The Norwood Police Department has been in exsistence since 1888 and during that time there has never been a black officer and there have been a total of three female officers.

Our Department is not representative of the community we serve. We need to be more reflective of not only the community we serve but the overall population as well. We need to be a more diverse department. We need to start a recruitment program to try and get more minority candidates to take our test.

We cannot effectively police those we serve to the best of our ability unless we are representative of those we serve. We have a reputation that has stuck with us for many, many years that we our prejudice against blacks. I can remember as a kid hearing that you wouldn’t see a black person walking through Norwood after the sun went down because they knew the cops would arrest them. Now I don’t know if it was true or not but I do know it is not something to be proud of. I also know that I have been here seventeen years and …show more content…

All of the officers are working a lot of overtime and are getting burnt out. If they are made aware that it is important to me to hire a more diverse group of officers I believe they will feel the urgency. I don’t say this because I believe they have that much respect for me; I would never be that pretentious. But I believe they would feel the urgency because they know it is what is best for the Department and because no other Chief has ever made it a priority. There is one caveat; the officers would want assurances that we will not hire diversity at the expense of hiring quality. They would want to know that we would not lower our

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