Asian-American Police Officer Case Study

increase of Asian-American police officers in this last few years, Asian officers still remain as the most underrepresented as compared to African-American and Hispanic officers.

The second research question was: What challenges do police recruiters face when recruiting prospective Asian candidates? The biggest challenge that most police recruiters face has been being able to gain trust, confidence, and cooperation from the Asian community. In order to recruit highly qualified Asian-Americans, police recruiters must be proficient in cross-cultural diversity, community mediation skills, and respecting individual rights (Hanser & Gomila, 2015). Three important factors that police recruiter must be cognizant of are: (1) generational status in

Once there has been a mutual establishment of trust, Asian immigrants will be able to communicate with the police about crime and various other issues within the community. Utilizing traditional methods of recruiting may not be effective enough to recruit Asian-Americans. Therefore, police departments are challenged to reinvent their traditional methods of recruitment, and approach Asian applicants with non-traditional methods to attract their attentions. In this competitive market, law enforcement on all levels of the government competes with one another to recruit highly qualified Asian-Americans to join their organization. For this reason, law enforcement agencies must demonstrate sincere commitment to recruit Asian-American

Castaneda and Ridgeway (2010) noted, “Recruiting new police officers in the 21st century was a challenging and expensive operation. Even with large investments in recruiting, departments struggled to fill their ranks to meet the demand for police services and to replace separating officers” (p. 59). Widespread protests regarding racial profiling and police brutality has created increasing efforts to recruit more minority police officers in every police department across the nation (Hanser & Gomila, 2015). A majority of police departments is facing server budget cuts due to economic struggles and drops in tax revenue; therefore, not all law enforcement agencies in the U.S. will have sufficient fund to invest in their recruitment campaign. Drops in tax revenues and severe budget cuts also caused local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, to lay off a certain amount of officers which creates significant cutbacks in service and unfillable vacancies (Matthies et al.,