AURORA | In a city where most residents are part of a minority group, city leaders have long been bedeviled by one question: How to make the public safety forces look more like the city they serve?
Despite just 46 percent of the city being white, the police department is about 83 percent white, while the fire department is 79 percent white.
Aurora police Chief Nick Metz said that in a policing climate that has seen friction between police and minority groups nationally, it’s especially crucial for departments to focus on making their ranks reflect their communities.
“There are a lot of communities around the nation right now that are concerned with the level of partnership with the police, and how that relationship looks between the police and the community,” he said.
Those communities are often communities of color and Metz said one way for police to bridge those gaps is for those communities to see police officers who share their background.
And while the diversity numbers have improved in recent years, the pace of progress has left some on city council frustrated.
City Councilwoman Barb Cleland, who leads council’s Public Safety Committee, said this week she is especially frustrated with the city’s lateral hiring program, which lets the departments hire firefighters and police officers from other cities.
When voters approved the program almost 30 years ago, Cleland said the goal was to improve minority hiring by allowing the departments to choose which hires to make, instead of having that decision largely dictated by scores on civil service tests.
“That was to (boost) minorities and protected classes, and I get very frustrated when we use the lateral program and it is predominately white males,” Cleland said during a committee hearing this week.
For the fire department, the program has seen a larger percentage of minority hires than the new-hire program has. Over the last four lateral academies for the fire department, 29 of the 36 firefighters hired have been minorities.
But the police department’s minority hiring through the lateral program hasn’t been as robust.
In the department’s 2015 lateral class, eight of the nine hires were white males, and the other was a white female. The numbers improved this year, but still 16 of the 24 lateral hires were white males and two were white females.
Cleland said that looking ahead to the next police lateral class, she worries the department won’t have enough minority hires.
“I’m scared to death it’s gonna be all white guys,” she said.
If the list of lateral applicants are primarily white males, Cleland said she would rather the department simply opt for new hires instead. The law doesn’t mandate that APD hire lateral candidates, she said, and if the program doesn’t add diversity in a given year, police should opt instead to reach into the new hire pool where they might land more minority candidates.
But police officials said the issue isn’t simple.
Division Chief Jim Puscian said that when the department decides how many officers they need to hire, they need to go after that number of officers, regardless of their race.
“Once we’ve decided how many we are going to hire I believe that would be discriminatory,” he said.
The most important thing for the department is to get the best officers, he said, regardless of their race.
And Division Chief Kevin Flynn said the lateral program has another benefit. Because city law mandates roughly two police officers for every 1,000 residents, the department in some years needs to hit a specific hiring figure to stay compliant. Flynn said that because the lateral academy is a few weeks shorter than the academy for new-hires, it allows the department to ensure they will hit that number.
Cleland said she understands those concerns but said she would like to see the lateral program used for the reason it was started: to make the police and fire departments more diverse.
“I do understand that it’s not easy, especially in the climate that we have now,” she said.
That climate, Metz said, includes virtually every department around the country looking to add minority officers.
“There are 17,000 police agencies that are all vying for new blood,” Metz said. “And in particular people of color.”