Biden Justice Department to investigate Memphis police in wake of Tyre Nichols killing.
Congress should investigate the DOJ's contributions to this outrage.
A few weeks after a group of Memphis police officers (all of them black) ganged up on and killed Tyre Nichols, I suggested there are two lessons to be learned from this outrage:
(1) the drive to hire “diverse” police officers is causing police departments to enlist people who shouldn’t serve and (2) the demonization of the police by the left has made it difficult to retain and recruit good officers — again, causing police departments to enlist people who shouldn’t serve.
Later, Bill expanded on the second of these lessons in a post called “Lowering Standards for Police Hiring Has Consequences, Now on Display at the Morgue.” He wrote:
At least two of the officers involved in the Tyre Nichols beating had criminal records that were overlooked in order to recruit them. Even worse, the officers serving on the Scorpion strike-force, an elite unit established to pro-actively go after the worst criminals, were inexperienced and poorly trained. The most experienced officer in the unit had six years in service. Others had less. Such a unit should have been made up of the most seasoned and best trained officers throughout the department.
Now, more than a month after Bill wrote this, the Washington Post has finally caught up with the story — almost. In this article, the Post demonstrates how in its scramble to hire police officers and promote “diversity,” the Memphis department “relaxed academic, disciplinary, and fitness standards at its training academy. . .opening the door for the hiring of officers who could become dangerous liabilities.”
After the city slashed pension benefits in 2014, and as high-profile police misconduct cases across the country began to sour public opinion of the profession, many officers left the department, and fewer applicants expressed interest, according to department statistics and interviews with current and former officers.
Hoping to boost admissions, the department announced in 2018 that it would defer college credit requirements for recruits, allowing applicants with high school diplomas and multiple years of work experience to join the force and pledge to attend college later. The city announced a $15,000 signing bonus for police recruits in 2021, and in 2022, the department said it was adjusting qualifying marks in fitness in an effort to exclude fewer applicants.
The Post documents how the public’s “souring” on the police impaired the Memphis department’s ability to find qualified candidates:
By 2021, the recruiters were going to more than 200 events a year and processing more than 4,000 applications, Davis [a recruiter for the department] said. For every person who applied, scores of others ignored the recruiters or insulted them, especially at high schools.
“We heard ‘f--- the police’ all the time from the kids at the schools,” Davis said. “It’s not a job that you stick your chest out and take pride in anymore.”
We can thank the American left, including the Post and the U.S. Justice Department (when under Democratic control), for the consequences of their meritless attacks on policing as “systemically racist.”
The lowering of standards which Bill and I highlighted also figures prominently in the Post’s report. To no one’s surprise, the paper downplays the extent to which the department’s desire to increase black representation in the force contributed to the lowering. But late in the article, the racial component (perhaps escaping an editor’s notice) slips in:
The hiring of [several of those involved in the killing of Nichols] coincided with a years-long effort in Memphis to field a police force that better reflected the racial makeup of the city. In 2014, the department was 46.7 percent White, while the city of Memphis is 27 percent White, according to Census Bureau data. The department is now 37 percent White, according to the city’s website.
Memphis academy instructors said the racial dynamics involved in hiring in recent years — combined with the department’s staffing push — ruled out disciplinary measures they had once relied upon.
This was not the only accommodation the department’s training program granted due to “racial dynamics”:
The academy became more lenient in grading, and students were allowed more chances to retake exams — including at the shooting range — after failures that would have led to dismissal under previous rules, the current and former officers said. Incidents of cheating did not always trigger dismissal, as in the past, four officers said. Struggling students were invited to study sessions in which they were taught upcoming test material straight from exam books.
Some of the black officers who killed Nichols benefitted from the department’s lowering of standards in service of racial diversity. A former academy instructor told the Post:
There were several officers in that group with Tyre Nichols that everybody wondered about when they were in the academy. You reap what you sow.
The Post’s article focuses on the training of recruits, not their initial selection for hire. But the Post does mention the bending of the college credit requirement and Bill pointed out that at least two of the black officers involved in the Tyre Nichols affair had criminal records that were overlooked in order to recruit them.
Nor can there be any serious doubt that the lowering of standards for hire, like those for graduating from the academy, was based in part on racial considerations. As the Post says, the city engaged in a “years-long effort in Memphis to field a police force that better reflected the racial makeup of the city” — an effort that achieved its (misguided) objective. You don’t shrink white representation in a police department from 47 percent to 37 percent in less than ten years without making race-conscious hiring decisions.
But making race-conscious police hiring decisions in the context of a shrinking pool of qualified applicants is a recipe for disaster. A department that’s not getting its usual number of good candidates to begin with can ill afford to depart from merit in selecting among the weaker-than-normal candidates who do apply.
To do so (and then pass those selected due to their race through the academy by again lowering standards) is to create a high risk of ending up with the kind of officers who killed Tyre Nichols. As the Post says, it “opens the door for the hiring of officers who could become dangerous liabilities.”
Meanwhile, the Biden Department of Justice has announced that it will investigate the Memphis police department. Clearly, an investigation is warranted. However, the Biden DOJ shouldn’t be the investigator.
A proper investigation would address the extent to which race-preferences in police hiring caused the Memphis police department to lower standards; the extent to which lower hiring and retention standards caused the department to field unqualified police officers; and the extent to which the officers who killed Tyre Nichols were among those black officers so hired and retained.
But Democratic administrations favor race-conscious hiring by police departments — a stated goal of the Democratic party. In fact, Vanita Gupta, the current associate attorney general who announced the investigation, publicly advocated “diverse hiring and promotion practices” by police departments to “reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.”
This is precisely what Memphis attempted to do. Thus, the Biden DOJ would be conflicted in any investigation of the link between race-conscious hiring practices and the degradation of policing in Memphis. But, of course, the DOJ investigation will not touch this issue, even though it’s at the heart of the killing of Tyre Nichols.
A proper investigation — as opposed to the one the Biden DOJ will conduct — would also address the extent to which the baseless attacks on police forces as systemically racist have led good officers to resign from department’s like the one in Memphis and have hampered the recruitment of qualified police officers to replace them. But the Department of Justice, when controlled by Democrats, has contributed to the demoralization of the police and the discouragement of potential recruits.
Indeed, key Justice Department officials have, in their private capacity, called for defunding the police. Kristen Clarke, the current head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division called for this in a 2020 op-ed. So again, the DOJ will avoid the important question of the degree to which anti-police commentary contributed to the problems with the Memphis department.
In my view, the Justice Department itself should be investigated for its role, under Democratic administrations, in the undermining of police departments throughout the country, including the one in Memphis. Now that Republicans control the House, nothing stands in the way of such an investigation.
It’s true that the Republican House is under pressure to investigate lots of other things — some deserving of scrutiny at that level, others not. But there are few matters more deserving of scrutiny than the damage Democrats have inflicted on police departments — and therefore on public safety — throughout America.
And now that the Nichols killing has brought home so graphically how this damage threatens black lives — to the point that even the Washington Post can’t ignore it — the case for such scrutiny is politically, as well as morally, compelling.