Does the Memphis PD need more or less affirmative action?

Is the Memphis police department so incompetent because of white supremacy or because it uses so much DEI in hiring?

Does the poor performance of the Memphis Police Department imply it needs more DEI or less?

The New York Times news section spins the news in favor of more affirmative action:

Memphis Police Used Excessive Force and Discriminated Against Black Residents, Justice Dept. Finds

The Police Department has been under scrutiny since Tyre Nichols’s death last year. The report noted that children in particular had experienced “aggressive and frightening encounters with officers.”

By Emily Cochrane and Shaila Dewan

Dec. 4, 2024

The Justice Department released the results of its investigation into the Memphis Police Department on Wednesday, finding that it had used excessive force, treated Black people more harshly than white people and mistreated those with mental health issues. The report said that the civil rights violations had a “corrosive effect.”

The 73-page report made special note of the treatment of children, saying that they had experienced “aggressive and frightening encounters with officers.” One 8-year-old boy with behavioral health issues had at least nine encounters with officers from December 2021 to August 2023, the report said, during which he was repeatedly threatened, pushed, handcuffed or thrown.

The Police Department has been under scrutiny since January 2023, when officers fatally beat Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, after pulling him over on his way home from work. The body and street camera footage that captured the violence prompted a national outcry and testimony from other residents about the agency’s pattern of excessive force.

Tyre Nichols was black, so it was a big national story. But then it turned out that the five Memphis cops who beat him to death were black too, so then the hullabaloo went on even longer has various pundits explained why it was still the fault of White Supremacy for reasons.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer drew an important distinction when he looked at a couple of dozen times the Department of Justice has intervened against local police departments. When the DoJ is motivated to get involved because of a single nationally publicized case involving a black man winding up dead, the results are usually a big rise in crime, a local version of the Ferguson Effect.

Indeed, the number of homicides in Memphis increased from 301 in 2022 to 397 in 2023.

On the other hand, if the DoJ is motivated because, say, the Albuquerque PD was shooting an unreasonable number of drunken cowboys, Mexicans, and Navajos over the years, but the national media barely notices because practically nobody in New Mexico is black, then the effects on the crime rate tend to be neutral.

But the more you hear about Memphis, the more it also sounds like an incompetent police department:

According to the report, Memphis police officers relied on traffic stops to address violent crime and did not understand the limits on their authority, resulting in dismissed cases and dropped charges. Officers rapidly escalated encounters, used excessive force even when people were already handcuffed, fired at moving cars and resorted to “intimidation and threats,” the report said.

The way the NYT frames the story, it’s all about whites oppressing Blacks:

Such actions, the report said, drove up racial disparities between Black and white residents. The federal analysis found that the Police Department was 21 percent more likely to cite Black drivers than white drivers for driving violations, and 17 percent more likely to arrest or cite Black people for drug-related offenses.

At the same time, the report said, the department has a poor record of solving violent crime. The department made an arrest in just 14 percent of murders last year, far below the national rate of 50 percent.

In the 19th paragraph, the New York Times finally gets around to mentioning that the police chief is a black lady, and in the 23rd paragraph that the 5 cops who beat the black guy to death are black too.

But it never gets around to letting on a key point in the Biden Administration report: the Memphis PD is majority black.

Memphis is 64.4 percent Black, 24.1 percent white, 8 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 1.6 percent Asian. … Fifty-eight percent of MPD officers are Black, 37 percent are white, and 3 percent are Hispanic or Latino.

But as I pointed out in Taki’s Magazine on February 1, 2023:

But if you are one of my readers, you are likely to think, “Wait a minute, doesn’t it take a lot of affirmative action to get to that high of a percentage of blacks qualifying for police work? If so, it’s not astounding that Memphis is the place that screwed up this badly.”

And indeed, the Memphis Police Department has a long history of racial preferences in hiring and promotion that has been amply documented in lawsuits. The legal website LRIS wrote in 2007:

Other than perhaps the plans in place in the Chicago police and fire departments, no affirmative action plan has been subject to more litigation than that used for promotions by the Memphis Police Department.

Not surprisingly to you or me, the history of attempts to boost black numbers at all levels of the Memphis PD is similar to the same bleakly comic history seen in Chicago, New York City, Frank Ricci’s New Haven, and just about everywhere else in America. It turned out to be impossible to square the circle of creating civil service tests that are both optimally valid and on which blacks perform as well as whites.

The same expedient was resorted to in Memphis as in Chicago: lowering the passing score into uselessness:

…the 2000 process utilized a cutoff score on the written test as an initial hurdle in the promotion process. When not enough African-American candidates passed the written examination, the City lowered the passing score so that 389 of the 444 candidates passed the written examination.

As I’ve often noted, making the test so easy that practically everybody passes in order to benefit blacks is more destructive than a more straightforward racial quota where you take the top scores of each race in rank order until their quota is fulfilled. At least with a blatant quota system you get the best of each race (although, of course, the quality is lower overall than in a color-blind system).

This is all just an inevitable outcome of affirmative action, but it’s not the kind of thing you are supposed to think about.