About 6 or 7 years ago, I considered a career change into law enforcement. I filled out an application to the Austin Police department and took it in for an interview.
All was well with one exception. Some years prior my driver’s license had been suspended for failure to maintain proper insurance (I was a poor and stupid college kid — no excuse for not doing the right thing…but that’s how it happened).
Anyhow — I was told that I had to wait about 16 more months before the suspension would be far enough back in my past to be able to apply.
Turns out, if I was black (and lived in San Antonio), I probably could have had that little license suspension overlooked:
A former San Antonio police officer set to be sentenced this week for allowing his live-in girlfriend to deal methamphetamine was hired by the department in 1994 despite being rejected two years earlier for reasons including a drunken driving conviction, a newspaper reports.
Background investigators also concluded that Joseph Anthony Evans tried to hide a criminal trespass arrest, a hit-and-run conviction and an internal investigation of sexual misconduct at a corrections officer job. He’d also been rejected by Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth, the San Antonio Express-News reports.
San Antonio police had also originally denied Evans a badge because polygraphs showed deceptive or inconclusive answers to questions ranging from illegal drug use to stealing from employers.
“Joseph Evans is not San Antonio Police Department officer material,” investigator Ignacio Cantu wrote in a 1992 memo recommending rejection.
He got hired despite all that? And I was told to come back in 16 months because my driver’s license had been suspended for one year nearly 5 years earlier?
Wow. I wonder how that could have happened?
Two officials involved in the hiring of Evans, who is black, say other applicants recommended for rejection during the administration of Chief William O. Gibson also were let onto the police force when the department was under pressure to meet affirmative action goals.
Sandoval, who retired in 1997, said he overrode other rejections from applicant screeners amid political pressure from City Hall to hire more black and female officers.
Well, shit — if only I’d been black or female. I would have applied to the San Antonio PD.
This is the idiocy of racial quotas over better qualified applicants (regardless of race or gender).
____
h/t to Greg at Rhymes with Right
Same thing happened to a bud of mine, after four years as a military policeman, and passing all of the tests and background checks. He tried to get on the KCPD, but they just flat told him, they were only hiring blacks, at that time.
So he went to work for the BOP at Leavenworth, was hired fairly quickly, and got promoted faster than he would have at the PD.
Left by no2liberals on January 28th, 2008 at 1:52 pm