Friday, March 27, 2015

In our society, “Diversity” is a goal pursued above all others, including competency; it is the magic word that makes the lowering of standards okay

… the value of a two year degree was not in question until the [Sarasota (Florida) police] department determined that it was a stumbling block to minority applicants who always seem to need some hand-holding to get over the finish line
writes Benny Huang.
Don’t blame me for saying it, blame Chief [Bernadette DiPino] for implying that minority applicants can’t meet the same standards as everyone else.

Chief DiPino, of course, doesn’t fret over the adverse effects of lower standards. According to Sarasota’s local CBS affiliate, “DiPino says there are other important requirements she looks for such as character, integrity and life experience.”

Like a good charlatan, DiPino deftly constructs a false choice—either Sarasota PD will have cops who embody those universally admired traits or it will have cops with college degrees. As if it can’t have both. But, as she already admitted, the goal is not to increase the police department’s quotient of “character, integrity, and life experience,” but rather to boost its melatonin.

“We’re not lowering our standards,” says Chief DiPino. Apparently ditching a two year degree requirement in favor of a GED does not constitute a lowering of standards. “We’re looking for people with good character, integrity, it doesn’t matter [the] color of skin…”

Except it does matter. If skin color were not an issue, Sarasota would have a colorblind hiring process, which it clearly does not. The chief has decided that there are just too many white guys on the force and she’s determined to remedy the situation. When she says that she just wants to hire the best people, without regard to race, she’s telling a big, fat, honking lie. If the chief wants more integrity on the force she should start by working on her own.

Sarasota’s hiring policy is just the latest in a nationwide pattern involving the lowering of standards in order to increase “diversity,” a commodity so valuable that it apparently supersedes pretty much all other considerations.

In Columbus, Ohio, the police and fire departments have become more lenient in hiring cops and firefighters who have taken prescriptions drugs not actually prescribed to them, who have had their driver’s licenses suspended for reasons such as failure to pay their car insurance, and who have had “minor physical or emotional domestic violence in the past 10 years” that didn’t result in criminal charges. Again, “diversity” is the magic word that makes it all okay. The Columbus police and fire departments are just too white, so now they will accept deadbeats. The implication here is that minorities are disproportionately delinquent in their financial responsibilities, which is actually not that far off the mark, but unmentionable unless you happen to be advocating “diversity.”

Amy DeLong, chief of Columbus’s Civil Service Division, echoed Chief DiPino almost word for word: “We are not lowering standards.” You’re not?

DeLong continued: “This is a tweaking and obviously we don’t want someone who is physically abusive or has a bad driving record, but we don’t want to eliminate people that could be good police officers.” What a relief! I thought standards were being lowered, when in fact they’re just being “tweaked.”

In North Miami, Florida, the police department abandoned its swimming test in 2004 because black applicants couldn’t pass it. Swimming is raaaaacist! Like all standards destined to be abandoned, the swimming test was uncontroversial until a push for diversity made people question its necessity. Suddenly it became a silly requirement with no practical application to police work, something like knowing how to juggle or ride a unicycle. There’s just one problem—a police officer, in the course of his duties, might someday have the swim. He might have to, oh I don’t know, rescue someone from drowning.

Once we’ve accepted that cops don’t really need to know how to swim, it’s only a short mental hop to the idea that lifeguards don’t either. Yes, lifeguards. In 2013, the city of Phoenix decided that it needed more minority lifeguards at its city pools. “The kids in the pool are all either Hispanic or black or whatever, and every lifeguard is white and we don’t like that,” said a Phoenix official. Geez, no racism there. She added that “the kids don’t relate; there’s language issues.”

Hmmm…maybe the kids should learn English? Sorry, asking people to learn English is racist. I take it back.

 … In our society, diversity is a goal pursued above all others, including competency.