Visible minority applicant concerns and assessment of occupational role in the era of community-based policing
✍ Scribed by Stephen B. Perrott
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 134 KB
- Volume
- 9
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1052-9284
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Attempts to recruit minority ocers are an integral component of community-based policing initiatives in Western democracies. To better understand how to optimize these initiatives, 80 African-Canadian police applicants were surveyed for perceptions of occupational role, career aspirations and obstacles to minority recruitment. Although service to the Black community was a high priority, applicants reported this goal as secondary to providing service regardless of ethnicity. Further, applicants reported they would be as eective policing the White community and more eective policing the Black community than their White counterparts. Racial prejudice on the part of police ocers and society were viewed as the most signi®cant obstacles to minority recruitment. Two tests of potential perceptual distortions indicated that applicants perceived African-Canadian acquaintances to be more frequent targets of police discrimination than they were as individuals, and perceived themselves as relatively less alienated from the police than were the police from their group. Discussion focuses on obstacles to minority recruitment, the ®t between applicants' attitudes and the demands of modern policing, and the potential impact of a more ethnically diverse force for police±minority relations.