The Trump administration has dropped the Biden administration’s push for onerous consent decrees on police and fire departments. These legal settlements micromanaged police operations and mandated DEI-based hiring and promotion practices.
“These radical requirements seem disconnected from how police departments actually work,” said Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon on Friday. “They tie officers’ hands and make communities less safe.”
The proposed consent decrees required departments to change how they tested prospective hires, increasing the share of black and female candidates hired.
Dhillon also warned that consent decrees drain resources, saying, “Once a judge imposes a consent decree, cities typically spend $10 million or more each year to comply with endless legal demands.”
Such money could instead go toward actually policing our streets.
Data on DEI
DEI practices have been pushed on police departments by Democrat presidents for decades, and economists have studied how such decrees impact the effectiveness of police forces, particularly when they change or eliminate testing standards to reshape the racial or gender makeup of departments.
There can, however, be advantages to hiring minority officers. In many cases, residents of minority communities are more likely to cooperate with officers who share their background. Minority officers can also serve undercover more effectively.
Consent decrees increase minority hiring by eliminating or reducing intelligence test standards. Since all new hires take these tests, the practice risks lowering the quality of new hires across the racial spectrum. Such recruiting has led to increased crime rates, and the largest increases have occurred in more heavily minority areas.
The effect is quite significant. On average, cities that had consent decrees for hiring imposed on them saw their violent and property crime rates falling relative to other cities before the consent decrees and rising relative to other cities afterward. The average yearly decline relative to other cities before the consent decree was -5.3 percent for violent crime, and the average yearly increase afterward was 4.8 percent.
Police departments that hired more black officers after changing their hiring rules also tended to lower their hiring standards the most. A 1 percent increase in the share of black officers correlated with a 4 percent rise in property crime and an almost 5 percent increase in violent crime. These crime spikes hit hardest in areas with the largest black population.
Affirmative Action for Women
In contrast to race-oriented affirmative action, which lowers standards for everyone, affirmative action for women sets lower strength, speed, and size standards that apply only to female applicants. Last year, as Los Angeles battled its worst fires in history, the fire department’s highly paid diversity head faced backlash when asked if she was strong enough to carry someone’s husband out of a fire. Her response: “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
For police, changing strength standards has some offsetting effects. Hiring more women for male-designated positions reduces the number of available slots for men, so lowering physical standards for women results in more competition for the remaining slots for men and thus tends to result in men meeting stricter standards.
Affirmative action for women does not significantly affect crime rates. The change in the quality of male recruits helps offset the lower requirements for women.
Technology and new operating procedures can offset some differences between men and women. Cars can replace foot and bicycle patrols. Two-officer units can replace single-officer units, but that shift reduces the area law enforcement can cover. Eliminating foot patrols also weakens local connections, as officers spend less time building relationships with the communities they serve.
My research suggests that increasing the number of black male cops slightly reduces police shootings of civilians. But more female officers increased shootings of civilians.
Why? Criminals are more likely to assault officers whom they think they can overpower. Every 1 percent increase in the share of women on a police force is associated with a 15 to 19 percent increase in the number of assaults on police.
Because of their weaker physical strength, female officers have less time to decide whether to fire their weapons. If a male officer waits too long, he still has a chance of using his strength to subdue an attacker. Female officers, by contrast, will tend to lose control of the situation at that point. Thus, not everything is offset by the increased competition for the male officer slots.
Creating a more diverse police force can produce the aforementioned benefits, but we have to be smart about it. Watering down or eliminating intelligence testing ends up hurting the very minority communities that we want to help.
Jesus Christ is King
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