At a public forum in September, Syracuse Police Department Chief Kenton Buckner announced plans to diversify the SPD. Buckner called for help from local community leaders, as well as the NAACP, to eliminate culturally biased questions from entrance exams.

According to the Syracuse Police Annual Reports, in 2018, the SPD was 87% white and 85% male. According to the most recent American Census Survey, however, Syracuse is composed of roughly 55% white people and 45% people of color.

But while lack of racial and gender diversity within the SPD is incredibly problematic, the bigger issue — one which does not seem to be the focus of the police chief’s initiative — is that less than 10% of the SPD lives within Syracuse. This means that less than 40 of over 400 officers of the department actually live in the city they serve.

Instead of merely striving to gradually make the officers of the SPD look like the communities they protect, wouldn’t it be a novel idea to strive to employ more officers who actually live within these communities? This would, without a doubt, result in an immediate change in the way that officers police the city, and the trust in which Syracuse communities place in the police. This latter relationship has long been severed, and if the police chief and the mayor want to put their money where their mouth is, they would focus on developing a plan to immediately address this pressing issue.

At the end of the day, an officer living in Syracuse is likely to have a greater personal investment in addressing drug use and gang violence in the city than an officer hailing from Fayetteville, Liverpool or Skaneateles. We should be policed by our own people. This does not necessarily mean that they have to be the same color as us — it simply means that they should come from the communities which they are supposed to be protecting, and should share a common goal with community leaders to improve the quality of life here.

Buckner and Mayor Ben Walsh’s desire to enact change within the Syracuse Police Department is commendable. Racial diversity among police officers is important, but the path to true community representation is a police force that come from that community.

Patrick McCarthy is a senior creative writing and American history major. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at pmcca100@syr.edu.

Published on October 17, 2019 at 12:22 am