Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers and others are going public with their claims that the city is lowering the standards for hiring new officers, both to achieve racialal “diversity” and to fill hiring targets.
Los Angeles Fox affiliate KTTV-11 reported Wednesday:
“I myself am a minority, and I completely believe in diversity in the department because that’s what makes Los Angeles a great city, but we need to hire good, qualified candidates that can do the job,” one source said.
“A lot of the people that are being hired right now should not be police officers,” another said.
…
“They’re not waiting for the best possible candidate to come by; it almost feels like they don’t have the time to do it; they want to meet the numbers now,” one source said.
Mayor Karen Bass pushed back on these claims, denying that the department is lowering standards. LAPD Chief Michael Moore also told KTTV that the complaints were coming from an older generation of officers.
As Breitbart News has reported, Los Angeles cut the force significantly during the Black Lives Matter riots, as then-Mayor Eric Garcetti pledged to cut more than 10% of the LAPD budget and redistribute it to “communities of color.” Bass took office amid the ensuing crime wave, and vowed to hire 1,000 new officers and to recruit specifically from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to increase the department’s diversity.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.;