Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't John Jr. (the dot read aloud .txt) 📖

Thus, “legalized” abortion actually served to increase crime since the 1970s. However this effect—both among African Americans and the population at large—was more than offset by other factors that caused the massive drop in crime of the 1990s. Before discussing these aspects, let’s look at one other factor that proved counter-productive in fighting crime.

What Increased Crime? Part II

Affirmative Action Hiring in the Police Force

Many police departments implemented affirmative action policies in the 1990s, just as the crime rate was entering a steep decline. But a close study reveals that crime fell despite these programs, not because of them. Perhaps most unexpectedly, these policies not only resulted in the hiring of less qualified women and minorities, but also of less qualified white applicants as well.

We must specify at the outset that crime rates did not rise due to the hiring of more women and minorities per se. Rather, the fault lies with the particular affirmative action rules that were adopted. There is little doubt that adding women and minorities to an all-male, all-white police force carries substantial benefits. Minority police officers often function more effectively than whites in minority areas. Since minority residents tend to vest more trust in minority officers, they are often more forthcoming with information that leads to arrests and convictions of criminals. Especially if the minority police officers grew up in the community they are patrolling, they may also be better at predicting the behavior of criminals in those areas. Furthermore, minorities are essential for various kinds of undercover operations, such as infiltrating race-based gangs. Likewise, female officers tend to elicit more information and honest reports of rape and spousal abuse from female victims, and they are much more able than men to carry out certain operations such as prostitution stings.

But affirmative action programs are not simply focused on achieving these benefits of a diverse police force. Instead, the trend has been toward boosting minority representation in a police department so that it reflects the demographic ratio of the surrounding community. The two goals are not necessarily the same, and the methods used to achieve the latter objective, unfortunately, have reduced the effectiveness of police in stopping crime.

Affirmative action policies have sought to transform traditional police hiring standards that rely on intelligence exams, strength tests, and criminal background checks. Because, on average, women are less likely to pass strength tests than are males, while African Americans have lower passing rates on intelligence exams and criminal background checks than whites, many police departments adopted new standards in an effort to increase minority hiring.

Police affirmative action programs have entailed two main approaches. The first is to lower testing standards across the board until they produce equal pass rates among minority and non-minority groups. This approach has become increasingly common over the last few decades. A leading method here has been to replace cognitive or intelligence exams with more nebulous psychological tests that aim to gauge a candidate’s temperament. Asking questions such as what is an applicant’s favorite color and whether he watches much television, the tests are designed to produce equal pass rates across different groups of applicants.42 According to a 1993 survey of twenty-three large police and sheriff’s departments, twenty departments had reduced their emphasis on cognitive skill testing due to the tests’ “adverse impact” on minority hiring.43 The other three departments had completely eliminated cognitive testing in hopes of increasing minority recruitment. An example of the meager new hiring standards is that to pass the reading test, “applicants had to score only as well as the bottom 1 percent of current police officers.”44

Louisiana provides a particularly instructive example. There, the Police Department discarded entrance exams in response to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice. The objections were that 66 percent of whites passed the test compared to just 25 percent of African Americans, and that the test did not relate to the abilities required for the job. The lawsuit was weak, failing even to explain what parts of the test were unrelated to the job. Moreover, a federal judge had previously ruled that the test did not discriminate against minority applicants to the police and fire departments in another city. Nevertheless, rather than incur the cost of litigation, the Louisiana State Police dropped the test and agreed to pay $1 million to African Americans who had failed the exam. The department even vowed to hire eighteen new officers from among this group 45

In some cities, such changes have resulted in myriad problems caused by a less-educated police force. For example, between 1986 and 1990, 311 of the 938 murder cases that the Washington, D.C. police brought to the U.S. attorney’s office were dismissed. One local prosecutor commented that “many D.C. cases were thrown out because prosecutors couldn’t read or understand the arrest reports [written by the police].” The officers simply lacked the ability to write comprehensible English.

But lower standards do not guarantee the desired pass rates among all races. In Chicago, the city paid $5.1 million for consultants to develop “unbiased” exams, only to have unacceptable numbers of minorities once again fail the tests. The city then moved to a heavily weighted seniority system for promoting police officers and a lottery system for hiring firefighters in order to ensure the correct racial composition of new classes of recruits.46

The second method for implementing affirmative action programs in police departments is “norming.” This assigns different standards to different groups of candidates in order to ensure similar pass rates. Norming is frequently used for female recruits, both to the police and to the military. For example, in the military, women are required to run two miles in eighteen minutes and fifty-four seconds, while men have sixteen minutes to run the same distance. Women have two minutes to do eighteen push-ups and two minutes for fifty sit-ups, while men must do forty-two push-ups and fifty-two sit-ups within the same time.47

Norming inevitably leads to the hiring of women who are,