[IPAC-List] Where to recruit black applicants for police officer?

[mhammer at 295.ca]

Nicely put, Glen.  It's one of the ongoing and eternal conundrums of
diversity recruitment: you can throw the doors as wide open as you can,
but you can't make everyone WANT the jobs you have to offer.  And as you
rightly note, one of the hurdles to be cleared is what people think about
the social role equated with those jobs.

I guess the question that prompts is whether it is sufficient to re-brand
the job/role in recruitment efforts so that prospective recruits can begin
to think of it differently and maybe find it more appealing (e.g., the way
that the military has included images of engineering roles in their
recruitment ads), or whether those efforts will be moot in the face of
deeply entrenched perceptions by one community about another.  I.E., do
you have to change the police, and their concomitant public reputation,
before you can get people interested in policing jobs?  I don't have an
answer for that one, but it bears pondering.

Mark Hammer


> Many police services are currently challenged with finding suitable
> applicants who will help them to be more reflective of the communities
> they serve - whether it is "black" applicants, or women, or hispanics, or
> southeast Asians, or indigenous people, or whoever. To be frank, the
> question shouldn't so much be "where do we find them" (they're everywhere)
> but rather "why don't they want to work for police services?"
>
> Some ethnic / religious / cultural / demographic communities are
> mistrustful of police, because of the way they have historically been
> treated by police, or they don't see police work as being a suitable
> "profession" for them, or they see a very dangerous and physically- and
> emotionally-challenging job in a traditionally male-dominated paramilitary
> organization and are put off by that. Still others see the police
> services' efforts to pull in a few visible minorities as tokenism. The
> challenge for police services is to overcome these misperceptions - and
> one way to do that (apart from actually starting to prove them wrong) is
> to begin to recruit "earlier" - i.e., target high school and college
> students who still haven't made up their minds on a career and educate
> them on the rewards of becoming a police officer, including the wide range
> of opportunities that exist for careers in policing, and concurrently,
> start to implement more inclusive workplace practices and remove barriers
> for minority applicants (for example, is the entrance exam culturally
> biased?).
>
> All this to say, that even if you do find concentrations of the desired
> applicants on campuses, in sports leagues, in religious organizations,
> working in McJobs they'd like to get out of... etc. you still have to
> convince them that policing is the right choice for them!
>
>
> Glen Morry, MASc
> Planning, Performance
> Management & Reporting
> Royal Canadian Mounted Police
>>>> Joel Wiesen <jwiesen at appliedpersonnelresearch.com> 2019/06/04 10:05 AM
>>>> >>>
> Where (geographic locations, websites, media, etc.) might one recruit
> black candidates for police officer - particularly candidates likely to
> do well on the entrance exam?
>
>
>
> --
> Joel P. Wiesen, Ph.D., Director
> Applied Personnel Research
> 62 Candlewood Road
> Scarsdale, NY 10583-6040
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelwiesen
> (617) 244-8859
> http://appliedpersonnelresearch.com
>
> Continuing Education website (home study of recent journal articles):
> https://www.aprtestingservice.com/
>
>
> Note: This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and/or
> legally privileged information. Please do not forward any contents without
> permission. If you have received this message in error please destroy all
> copies, completely remove it from your computer, and notify the sender.
> Thank you.
>
>
> _______________________________________________________
> IPAC-List
> IPAC-List at ipacweb.org
> https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/ipac-list
>