Emanuel opens the door to relaxing police hiring standards

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday opened the door to allowing candidates with minor drug and criminal offenses to become Chicago Police officers to attract minorities at a time of high crime and deep distrust.

Emanuel said he’s leaning toward relaxing the hiring rules at the behest of three powerful aldermen: Finance Committee Chairman Edward Burke (14th); Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th), chairman of the City Council’s Black Caucus, and Hispanic Caucus Chairman George Cardenas (12th).

“I want to take a look at the general idea that, if somebody did something when they were 16 or 17, that doesn’t become an entire impossibility, as long as it’s not serious, to joining a police department,” the mayor said.

Emanuel said his feelings on the issue were reinforced earlier this week when he looked out at the latest class of 100 recruits to enter the police academy.

“Looking at all that diversity — from gender to race to culture to faiths — and saying, ‘That’s the strength of the city,’” the mayor said.

“I see all that promise, all this diversity. Then, I realize that there’s other kids who could be sitting in that chair if it wasn’t just for … one little thing. I say little because it’s got to be small, in my view. [That should not prohibit them from becoming] a public servant and fulfilling their aspirations of being a police officer. It’s not just punching a clock. It’s more than that. And I think we should be generous in that effort. That’s where I’m starting from.”

The mayor noted that young people make mistakes. That should not be a permanent impediment to future employment.

“Look at all of you, look at me. We all know what we did in the past. But, I’m standing here. You’re here in this room,” he said.

Earlier this month, Sawyer (6th) urged the mayor to embrace at least some of the recommendations made by the Obama administration’s Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement initiative.

On Wednesday, the effort picked up steam.

Burke and Cardenas joined Sawyer in sponsoring a resolution calling for City Council hearings to discuss implementing the federal recommendations.

The report suggests that police departments across the nation should disregard minor criminal offenses of candidates from “underrepresented communities,” revise the controversial psychological exam and lower the bar for written and physical exams.

“Certain barriers — including background investigations that treat all arrests and criminal convictions alike regardless of type of offense or how recent the occurrence, or even screen out those voluntarily admitting to drug use alone [without any conviction] — can prevent the agency from hiring the diverse officers it needs to connect with and serve the entire community,” the report says.

Likewise, psychological tests and credit checks put up “discriminatory employment barriers to women and racial minority applicants,” the report states.

Burke made a similar argument Wednesday.

“Simply put, there are many occasions when a minor incident that occurred many years ago should not be enough to rule out a candidate for consideration,” Burke, a former Chicago Police officer and ex-Police Committee chairman, said in a news release.

“We are not so much asking the department to lower [its] hiring standards as we are asking them to apply a greater standard of fairness.”

Sawyer added, “I have even seen cases when someone was simply playing basketball in an arena that was closed off for a moment who ended up being denied a job in law enforcement because they were cited for trespassing.”

Cardenas agreed that it “does not seem right to allow a minor offense to follow someone for the rest of their life, especially when they can demonstrate that the incident has no bearing on the life they lead today.”

All three aldermen argued that a decision to embrace the new hiring guidelines would result in “more Chicagoans of color being accepted into the ranks” of a Chicago Police Department still under the cloud of a federal civil rights investigation triggered by the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.

Already, the city has launched an unprecedented outreach campaign and waived the $30 application fee in an effort to attract more black and Hispanic applicants and allowed candidates to file their applications on mobile devices.

In 2008, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on a little-known appeal process for police candidates who are rejected by the department because of problems in their backgrounds.

About a third of 220 people who appealed to the city’s Human Resources Board were then returned to the hiring list between 2005 and 2007. They included former gang members, admitted pot smokers, a man who slashed someone in a bar fight, former military veterans with personality disorders, and a woman whose husband was convicted of murder. Three aldermen wrote letters endorsing candidates with arrests in their backgrounds.

Former Police Supt. Phil Cline unsuccessfully tried to do away with that appeal process. At the time, retired police personnel chief Brad Woods said some of the candidates put back on the list later became officers and “did not do well at all.”

The upcoming police exam is needed to maintain a continuous pipeline of candidates to deliver on Emanuel’s two-year promise to bolster the ranks of the Chicago Police force by 970 officers over and above attrition.