From The We Get What We Deserve Department:

Walter Williams (at Townhall.com) chronicles the evil of quota cops.


Police departments must use race and sex preferences in hiring as a result of federal court consent decrees and political pressures. To meet these demands, many police departments have lowered, and in some cases eliminated, established standards for personal character and intellectual and physical capacity.

Jan Golab writes about this in "How Racial P.C. Corrupted the LAPD" in the May 2005 issue of The American Enterprise. While most of Mr. Golab's article chronicles how Los Angeles damaged its police force in its quest for "diversity," where it's had to fire 100 police officers, identical damage has occurred in other cities. Washington, D.C., had to indict or fire 250 cops; New Orleans indicted more than 100. In these cities, policemen have been charged with crimes ranging from murder and rape to robbing drug dealers and selling confiscated drugs.

Most policemen are honest, dedicated and hard-working people who put their lives on the line to protect us against criminals. A few, Mr. Golab reports, are no less than criminals themselves. In 1997, L.A. policeman David Mack was arrested for the armed robbery of a Bank of America branch in which he heisted $772,000. In the late 1990s, as many as 25 L.A. policemen were believed to have direct gang ties. A significant number of L.A. policemen had off-duty jobs providing security for hoodlums in the rap music industry deeply involved in drugs and gang violence. At least one policeman was arrested as a guard at a cocaine house.

In the wake of L.A.'s Rampart Division scandal, where 30 officers were suspended or fired, former LAPD deputy chief Steve Downing said, "Rampart wasn't about cops who became gangsters. It was about gangsters who became cops." Downing adds that elected officials refuse to acknowledge the obvious: Institutionalized racial preferences "allowed persons of poor character to be hired."