Hiring not based on diversity

City police hire best candidate available when hiring officers, but plan to build on relationships with minorities

Peterborough Police is investing time and energy into building relationships with groups such as new Canadians and the LGBTQ community, said Police Chief Murray Rodd, but they’ve made “no conscious effort” to hire new officers from minority groups.

“Any diversity we’ve achieved has been by hiring the best candidate in the pool, at the time,” Rodd told the police board at a meeting Tuesday night.

Rodd was asked by the board in December to develop a new report about minorities on the police force; he presented it Tuesday evening.

The report explained in detail the efforts Peterborough Police has made to reach out to groups such as the Community Race Relations Committee, Black Lives Matter and the New Canadians’ Centre.

But it had no statistics showing how many women or people of colour are on the police force. Rodd wrote that there’s never been any “deliberate or conscious effort” to hire from those groups.

Rodd told the board that interest in policing as a career is waning because it’s difficult and dangerous work. It’s challenging enough to find excellent candidates without narrowing the field in a quest for diversity, he said.

Coun. Dan McWilliams, who sits on the police board, said he’s concerned the police could be “lowering their standards” for hiring if they are too intent on inclusive hiring practices.

“Diversity is wonderful, but diversity can’t trump the best candidate,” he said.

McWilliams said that’s what has happened in the U.S., where police services have been too concerned about seeking out minority candidates.

“They’ve taken a lower standard – they’ve hired people who were never fit to be officers in the first place,” he said. “I don’t want it to be two-feet-and-a-heartbeat and away we go.”

Board member Ken East said he didn’t see it that way at all.

“The challenge is, in my view, to ensure the composition of the service is broadly reflective of the composition of the population,” he said.

East said that means coming up with strategies to include women, people with disabilities, visible minorities and First Nations people on the force.

East wants to know how many such people are city police officers, at the moment – and he wants the board to come up with some strategies to hire from those “categories”.

East also said he’s “immensely skeptical” of this idea that hiring the person who appears bestqualified.

“Best-qualified is an extraordinarily subjective term,” he said, adding that he’d wanted to be a police officer in the 1960s but was rejected because he wears glasses (you couldn’t be a police officer if you wore corrective lenses in the 1960s).

“I understand this isn’t easy – it’s a competition for the best and the brightest, however you might define that,” East said. “But you have to keep trying – diversity doesn’t happen by accident.”

But Mayor Daryl Bennett said he didn’t think the term “best qualified” is so subjective.

“I don’t see colour, gender or race when I see someone in uniform,” he said.

Peterborough’s officers are excellent, he said, and he sees no need to make changes to hiring practices.

“Our numbers (of minority groups in the city) aren’t significant enough to say we need to be balanced, colour-wise,” he said.