The police are not the only factor in creating and keeping public safety and order. They may not even be the most important factor.
But they certainly are an indispensable one, and it makes sense to think that whatever makes for a more effective police force also will make for a safer, more peaceful community.
It is widely accepted in urban America that one such thing is to have a police department whose racial and ethnic makeup reflects that of the community it serves and protects.
There is no scientific proof of this. But given this nation’s ugly racial history and its persistent racial antagonisms-including widespread distrust of the police among racial and ethnic minorities-it is not an unreasonable supposition.
That’s why the results of the latest Chicago police sergeant’s promotion exam-only five blacks and Hispanics were among the 114 persons who won promotion-are legitimate cause for concern.
This is not a cosmetic issue, a matter of looking good or being politically correct. It is about the essence of the police force’s mission: keeping the peace.
That’s why the Daley administration ought to be worrying not about whether the sergeant’s exam can be somehow fixed to yield different racial results. It ought to be worrying about whether a test is, by itself, the best way to identify good sergeants or whether there may be some other, better way.
The reliance on tests for hiring and promotion is a result of the civil service movement and other “good government” efforts that sought to remove politics, personalities and other non-merit influences from governmental processes.
That is a laudable goal. But to the extent that it relies solely on testing, it rests on a myth and a demonstrably false assumption. The myth is that perfect objectivity is achievable; the assumption is that a test can capture all the aspects of a job that are important in a hiring or promotion decision.
No test can do that and no intelligent user ought to expect it to. However, the politics of municipal and other government hiring have become such that it is all but impossible to do things otherwise. Everyone is too heavily invested in “the test” as the way to hire and promote to seriously consider anything else.
In Chicago, however, the time to consider another approach may have arrived-even though it is fraught with perils of its own.
Everyone in virtually every line of work knows someone who possesses none of the standard credentials and yet is brilliant at the actual work-just as everyone knows someone who has all the credentials and doesn’t know which end is up when a practical task has to be done.
Leadership positions like police sergeant are perfect examples of jobs in which non-objective, unquantifiable elements-the stuff we commonly call “chemistry”-come into play. Part of that chemistry for a police sergeant has to be the way he or she relates to citizens on the street-and race is part of it.
Not to take these non-objective factors-including race, when it bears so intimately on the job as it does in this case-into consideration is to do a disservice to the citizens who rely on the police.
To go back to a promotion system that incorporates non-objective criteria-interviews, job ratings and so forth-along with tests is not a step to be taken lightly. Along with the possibility of improvement, it offers enormous temptations to abuse.
But such temptations exist under the current system-witness the now-outlawed practice of “race-norming” and the equally suspect practice of “banding.”
Perfection is not an option. Improvement, however, including criteria that take account of traits and talents that can’t be captured in a test, ought to be.
