By Laurence Hammack, Mike Hudson and Ron Brown
Roanoke Police Chief M. David Hooper, whose department has fewer black police officers than any major city in Virginia, isn’t sure why he doesn’t receive more black applicants for police jobs.
“Ask the people who would be the applicants,” Hooper said.
Although Hooper and city officials say they are working to recruit more black officers, other cities in Virginia have had more success.
Roanoke has a black population of about 22 percent, yet only 3 percent of the city’s police officers are black – by far the lowest rate among Virginia cities with populations of 40,000 or more.
“If other communities can find them, then why can’t Roanoke?” said Evangeline Jeffrey, president of the Roanoke NAACP. “Or is there a more serious problem that deters black people from wanting to apply?”
Although the NAACP has not publicly pushed for better minority police recruiting, Jeffrey said recent events – such as complaints of police using excessive force in dealing with blacks – have made the issue a priority.
“It’s becoming very critical because of the situations that are happening and the volatile potential that is there,” she said.
Eugene Cheek, a Richmond civil-rights attorney who was a prosecutor in Roanoke from 1984 to 1988, said he believes Hooper isn’t conscious of the need to recruit black officers.
“Chief Hooper, he’s back in the Dark Ages as far as that,” Cheek said. “If he didn’t have any blacks on his police force, I don’t think he would care.”
Hooper said his department and city officials had been trying to recruit blacks long before newspaper stories raised the issue in June.
“I feel now and have felt for a long time that it would be more desirable for us to have more black police officers,” he said. “It would give me more flexibility. It would give the shift commanders more flexibility in assignments.”
But 16 months after Hooper issued an internal memorandum outlining a recruiting approach aimed at minorities, the plan has yet to be implemented.
“It was a draft directive,” Hooper said, adding that he is not sure if the plan has been revised since then.
Police had refused to provide a copy of the document, but it was obtained last week by the Roanoke Times & World-News.
The document – a requirement in the department’s efforts to gain national accreditation – proposes setting a timetable for meeting recruiting goals, creating a budget and evaluation system and writing “a plan of action to correct inequities.”
While emphasizing the importance of attracting minority applicants, the internal document says that “recruiting is the primary responsibility of the city Personnel Department.”
The Police Department voluntarily began seeking the national accreditation in February 1989. Standards for accreditation call for “preferential recruitment” that would bring the department’s minority makeup closer to the city’s. The standards also recommend recruiting from outside the community if necessary to increase the number of minorities in the department.
Ken Cronin, the personnel department’s manager, concedes, “We’ve got more work to do” in recruiting black police officers. But, he said, “We’re out there pushing police officers harder than anything else.”
A recruiter from the city personnel office visits predominantly black colleges in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. The city holds minority job fairs, has produced radio commercials, and recently set up a police recruitment booth at Valley View Mall.
City officials say they send out mailings regularly to more than 100 community organizations about job openings, and stay in touch with the NAACP and the black ministers association.
However, Jeffrey said that, in the eight years she has headed the Roanoke NAACP, she cannot remember Hooper or city personnel officials ever contacting her and asking for help in recruiting police officers. If the city asked, she said, NAACP officials would be willing to help locally or to accompany city officials on out-of-town recruiting efforts.
Also, Hooper said he could not remember sending a black police officer to a black college to recruit. And some say the lack of black school resource officers hampers the department’s ability to recruit at the high-school level. Such programs also provide an opportunity for officers to act as role models and talk to young people in a non-threatening environment.
Over the past three years, 133 blacks applied for police officer jobs in Roanoke. Two were hired.
During the same time, 544 whites applied. Fifty-four were hired.
City officials said they did not have records of how many of those who didn’t become officers dropped out of the application process and how many were rejected. They could not come up with figures for earlier than 1987.
Roanoke is not a member of the Eastern Regional Recruiters and Applicant Investigators Association, which serves as a clearinghouse for minorities who want to be police officers. The association includes about 100 members from police agencies across the United States, said its president, Karen Shelton.
Shelton, a police recruiter for Baltimore County, Md., said association members frequently go to criminal justice job fairs at historically black colleges, such as Virginia Union and Norfolk State.
“I don’t remember ever seeing Roanoke at our recruiting assignments,” she said.
Many police departments in Virginia have had problems recruiting black officers.
For example, just 11 percent of the officers in the Chesapeake Police Department are black – in a city where 43 percent of the citizens are black.
Some small cities in the state have done much better, however.
In Charlottesville, where 20 percent of the population is black, 19 percent of the police officers are black.
In Danville, where 30 percent of the population is black, 18 percent of the officers are black.
Shelton said smaller cities such as Roanoke aren’t automatically at a disadvantage in competing against big ones such as Dallas or Washington, D.C.
“Some people want a smaller-town setting instead of a big metropolis,” she said, because the smaller places may have a better quality of life and are less dangerous for officers.
Hooper said Roanoke’s low unemployment rate might be one reason his department has not been as successful in recruiting as other Virginia cities. More people will apply for police jobs when other jobs in a city are scarce, he said.
Roanoke’s unemployment rate for June was 3.1 percent; The statewide figure was 4.2 percent.
Hooper said most people who apply at the department come in through contact with one of his officers. But the low number of black officers now on the job wouldn’t necessarily hinder recruiting, he said.
“White officers recruit black candidates as well,” he said. “That’s not color-exclusive by any means.”
Shelton, the recruiters association president, said the U.S. Justice Department pushed minority hiring during the late 1970s. Many police departments were under court order to hire more black officers.
But the federal government retreated from such efforts in the 1980s and now the pressure is off, she said. “There’s not a real push for minorities, unless a news article or something like that happens.”
She said the push has to come from within a police department or from a vocal local organization, such as the NAACP.
Shelton said departments that have officers walking a beat and getting to know people in their neighborhoods have a better chance of persuading young blacks to become officers.
“You’d be surprised by how much you can do if you get to the kids early,” she said. “They’ll remember when you say something to them because kids are always fascinated by police.”
In Roanoke, just three of the city’s 142 patrol officers are black. The other five black officers hold supervisory or investigative positions.
Hooper has said that having a small number of black officers should not hamper the department’s day-to-day operations.
“A police officer is a police officer,” he said. “His race should make no difference in what is the appropriate behavior. And it makes no difference in what is the law.”
Lt. Arthur Roane, the director of Richmond’s recruit academy, disagrees.
In the real world, he said, you can’t expect a white officer to get the same results in a black neighborhood as a black officer.
Roane, who is black, said he can’t go into a rich white neighborhood and expect the same results as a white officer.
“Different socialization,” he said. “We don’t speak the same language, so to speak. You definitely can’t take any police officer and plug him into the same situation and expect the same results. That’s ridiculous.”