Minority police advocates call for end of BPD tests, not ‘defunding’

City Councilor Andrea Campbell and minority police officer advocates are calling for an end to internal BPD tests they say are discriminatory, while discouraging calls of “defunding” police.

The call for change comes as minority officers struggle for internal reforms.

“Mayor Marty Walsh may have not started these policies, he may not have been a person in office when these lawsuits were filed, but he is in the unique position today to start to make those changes and address what the court is seeing within the Boston Police Department,” said Eddie Crispin, president of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers.

The small group of minority police representatives, lawyers and few dozen supporters stood Tuesday in front of City Hall while the city discussed the BPD’s budget amid widespread calls for defunding following continued protests over George Floyd’s killing.

The 2008 version of the promotional exam, the center of a lawsuit won by black BPD sergeants, was determined by a federal judge in 2015 to be discriminatory against minorities. Just last month, the same federal judge awarded the sergeants back pay.

The BPD’s hair follicle drug test was also the focus of a Supreme Judicial Court ruling against the city last year when an applicant whose hair tested positive for cocaine was deemed to have been wrongly denied the job.

“The city and state have nevertheless relied on these exams to make promotional decisions, even knowing that they will be disproportionately excluding black and brown officers,” Campbell said.

A BPD spokesman Tuesday confirmed the tests were still in use and declined further comment.

A spokeswoman Tuesday for Walsh said the mayor has previously expressed his interest in eliminating the hair test.

Campbell urged the audience Tuesday to “be careful” when speaking of defunding the police, emphasizing with Crispin that minority officers are consistently fighting for internal reform.

Paul Joseph, one of the BPD sergeants who won the suit against the promotional exam, called defunding “a simplistic answer to a complicated problem.”

“I caution people to really study the issue before they make reactionary decisions,” Joseph told the Herald. “There are actually people who are on the edges, on the border of society who actually need the police to protect them.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3hb5ftB