Month: May 2021

In separate interviews, Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder and former Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart outlined their records in working to increase the representation of minorities in their departments and proposed additional actions.

Both said that ending U.S. Justice Department oversight under four-decade-old federal consent decrees would give them greater flexibility to adopt measures aimed at increasing diversity.

Both called for granting the counties permission to stop administering their own police hiring civil service tests and instead use a state-run exam as the yardstick for selecting candidates.

Hart, who resigned this month, said in an October interview that she had expressed “concern” about the department’s lack of diversity after she was appointed in 2018.

To attract Black and Hispanic hiring candidates, Hart increased the department’s recruiting staff to four officers, up from one. She said she also met with community leaders for “some difficult conversations around race and policing” and encouraged the leaders to find people who would sign up for the employment exam.

Deputy Police Commissioner Risco Mention-Lewis, who participated in Newsday’s interview with Hart, said she often challenged community leaders to drum up applicants by saying, “Give me 50.”

“If you want more, then you’ve got to be part of the solution,” Mention-Lewis said.

Hart said she assigned a seven-officer group to identify parts of the hiring process that had disproportionately eliminated minority candidates.

“It’s what we’re trying to turn the tide on completely, and what our efforts have been toward,” Hart said. “We need to look at the entire system and look at it as a holistic approach. It doesn’t stop once the test is offered and recruiting stops. Now we look at the hiring standards in the hiring guidelines. And that’s what we did here.”

She cited making the physical fitness test requirements accessible to candidates on the department’s website and granting applicants who fail the fitness test four weeks to retake it, up from two.

Hart said the department had also taken responsibility for judging background investigations away from officers who had conducted the investigations. Under a new system, police investigators refer their findings to county civil service officials, who then determine whether applicants are suitable for employment.

Asked how she would change the hiring process if she had the power to enact reforms, Hart cited ideas including finding potential recruits in new fields.

“Can we identify areas that we see as really correlated to a successful officer, whether it’s some, maybe, a background in social work or working with the mental health fields or teaching youth or a youth counselor?” Hart said. “Identifying those areas, which we do have on the job, but maybe in the future really just kind of attracting those candidates.”

Ryder, who took over as Nassau commissioner in 2018 after rising through the department’s ranks for 32 years, said in an October interview, “We lack in our diversity, we know that. But it’s not from a lack of trying.”

He said, for example, that he adopted a program that enables officers to act as mentors to minority job applicants who have passed the written hiring test. The Nassau Guardians, the department’s fraternal group of Black officers, proposed the idea last summer to help increase minority hiring rates.

Ryder said Nassau focuses its recruiting efforts in minority communities and specifically targets high school and college students as they are thinking about their future. Ryder pointed to the success of the department’s “Explorers” program, which connects youths ages 14 through 20 with current police officers as a way to help them learn about the job.

Asked how he would go about developing a hiring system for Nassau police officers if given unilateral power to do so, Ryder responded, “I like the process that we do now.”

The Justice Department oversees police hiring in both counties under consent decrees that settled lawsuits accusing Nassau and Suffolk of having “engaged in a pattern or practice employment discrimination” by race, ethnicity and gender.

The consent decrees require the counties to develop their own hiring exams, engage in “vigorous” efforts to recruit minorities and file regular reports with the federal agency. They call on the counties to hire minorities at rates that “roughly approximate” their interest in becoming police officers.

Hart described Suffolk’s consent decree as “well intentioned, “antiquated,” and ineffective.

“I think the evidence is in the fact that we have not moved that needle,” she said, “I think that there’s real constraints in that.”

Both commissioners said that federal oversight was time-consuming and cumbersome. Each said that the Justice Department’s review of grading standards after tests are administered can bring hiring to a standstill for up to a year. Hart also said that the agency has set Suffolk’s minimum educational requirement at a high school diploma, a standard she viewed as too low.

“I think that we’d be better served with a higher requirement than that,” she said.

The Nassau department requires 32 college credits, the rough equivalent of one year of post-high school education.

As ordered by the consent decree, the counties have hired testing companies to develop, administer and grade police exams when they are administered every four to six years.

Nassau’s most recent contract with AON, a human resources consulting firm, cost as much as $1.2 million and covered both the hiring test and a promotional exam. Suffolk’s 2019 contract with P.S.I. Services, a testing company, had a price cap of $533,550.

New York State administers a police hiring test every two years. The state police use the exam in hiring officers, as do more than 90 municipalities, including the Glen Cove and Long Beach forces.

Ryder and Hart said using the state test would relieve their departments of the complex and costly responsibility of producing their own exams, and enable the counties to invite applicants more frequently to join their forces, because it would be less time consuming of a process, allowing the counties the option of offering a police exam more often. They also said they would be able to start processing applicants based on their test score quicker.

“I’d rather take the state test and give it every two years and give a kid a shot over and over,” Ryder said, “and not just turn around every six years and say, I’ll see in six years, kid, you didn’t make this one.”

Hart added, “It certainly gives more freedom and I think most departments use it for a reason.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Kristina Mastropasqua declined to comment on Newsday’s findings or to make available attorneys responsible for enforcing the department’s consent decrees with Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Four Long Island civil rights leaders said that Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder relied on negative stereotypes of Black and Hispanic families to explain in a Newsday interview his department’s failure to attract greater numbers of minority hiring candidates.

Two of the leaders ­– NAACP Long Island Regional Director Tracey Edwards and Luis Mendez, formerly Nassau’s deputy director of minority affairs — urged County Executive Laura Curran to ask for Ryder’s resignation.

“As a daughter of a Black police officer and proud aunt of a Black doctor, I am totally disgusted by the police commissioner’s ethnic stereotypes and blind ignorance,” Edwards said, adding:

“Clearly, based on his statements, he is unfit to serve the rich diversity of Nassau County. On behalf of the NAACP Long Island Region, I call on the county executive to thank Police Commissioner Ryder for his service and expedite his retirement. If County Executive Curran in any way defends his comments, she is unfit to serve as well.”

Civil rights leaders react to Ryder’s comments

Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder faces criticism that he stereotyped Black and Hispanic families to explain why his department doesn’t attract more minority hiring candidates. Credit: Newsday staff

Newsday provided Nassau County Executive Laura Curran with an audio recording of Ryder’s Newsday interview and informed both her and Ryder about the responses to the commissioner’s statements, including calls for his dismissal.

Ryder scheduled and canceled a Newsday interview to respond to the criticism that was arranged to be recorded on video. Curran’s press office then emailed statements from both of them. While expressing commitments to diversifying the police department, each specifically addressed Ryder’s remarks briefly.

Ryder wrote: “My intention in my responses was not to be hurtful to anyone but to show how we are continuing to improve recruitment efforts to increase diversity through community outreach and supporting applicants throughout the process.”

Curran wrote: “I do not believe lack of diversity in law enforcement is tied to family make-up.”

Full interview with Commissioner Ryder

In a one-on-one interview with Newsday, Commissioner Patrick Ryder discussed what he sees as the obstacles to his goal of increasing diversity in the Nassau County Police Department. Credit: Newsday staff

In Newsday’s interview, Ryder focused on a gap between the number of minorities who registered to take the police hiring test and the number who eventually took the exam.

He cited figures indicating a 10% drop among whites, a 43% drop among Hispanics, and a 57% drop among Blacks in a round of hiring that began in 2018.

“That’s a problem right off the bat — what happened to those other thousand?” Ryder said, referring to a decline in Blacks from 2,800 who signed up to 1,200 who took the test. “I lost 1,000 kids that could, if I got 10% of that, that would drive my diversity.”

Ryder attributed the fall-off among minorities to the presence of “broken homes” or to a lack of parental support in their communities. He also said that, compared with white peers, relatively few minority career-seekers have family members who work as police officers and can serve as guides to getting hired.

“I grew up around families that had cops in it, there was a push to take the test, there was a push to make sure I got everything done,” Ryder said. “I also had two parents at home pushing me, getting me up and making sure I went to the academy, making sure I did what I was supposed to do.”

“These kids struggle in these communities because they don’t have both parents around. They don’t have a family history of law enforcement. And they’re at a disadvantage starting off. And we have to recognize it’s true.”

As an example, Ryder pointed to recruitment efforts in Roosevelt, a community where all but 11 of the district’s 3,346 students are Black or Hispanic, according to the state education department.

“Look, a lot of these kids come from broken homes,” he said. “A lot of the kids come from struggles in their neighborhood. And they need that advantage, they need someone to push them a little bit.”

Discussing a new mentorship program in which minority officers will help minority applicants navigate the hiring process, Ryder also said:

“I can’t fix the family home, but I can fix the kid, I can help him get better and work with him to make sure we don’t lose that kid and get him onto the job. There’s some great kids out there that we’d love to have part of this department.”

In his Newsday interview, Ryder suggested that the department faced challenges attracting Jews, Asians and Muslims because of what he said were the career preferences of members of those groups. He said:

“When we look at diversity in a police department, you’ve got to go look at other employments around the country. What’s the percentage of Asians that are in the doctor world? What is the percentage of lawyers that are Jewish? You know, these are real facts, real numbers, and they are high on both sides. I have great friends from the Muslim community. And I asked them why don’t you get your son to take the test? He said I want my son to be a doctor. I want my son, my daughter to be a doctor. Okay, but respectfully, that’s their choice, not ours. So we lose those candidates.”

He also stated: “I think the process we have is good. I think giving kids a little advantage in minority communities is good, too. They just don’t have it. They don’t have mom and dad.”

Shown transcripts of Ryder’s statements, Edwards, Mendez, as well as Elaine Gross, president of Erase Racism, and Theresa Sanders, president and chief executive of the Urban League of Long Island, said in separate interviews that he had falsely portrayed minority families and was holding minority communities responsible for the department’s recruitment failures.

Edwards was among a group of more than a dozen that quit Nassau’s community advisory panel in January after the county released a 310-page police reform plan that they said they neither helped create nor had a chance to review.

Gross said Ryder’s statements “were really a reflection of stereotypes and other derogatory kinds of comments that sort of makes your skin crawl when you hear it.”

She continued: “He’s basically blaming Black people or people of color for not being on the police force, rather than him saying, ‘We have a responsibility, and these are all of the things we’ve done to remove impediments that may be there, so that we will have more representation from diverse communities.'”

Ryder leads the largest police force in a county whose population has changed markedly in his three decades in the department.

In 1990, the U.S. Census counted residents as 83% white, 8% Black, 6% Hispanic and 3% Asian. By 2019, the make-up had been transformed to 60% white, 11% Black, 17% Hispanic and 10% Asian, according to Census estimates.

The Urban League’s Sanders said Ryder showed that he lacks a full understanding of Long Island’s minority population.

“I would never say somebody should step down. I don’t think that it was that egregious,” she said. “I believe that he really believes what he’s saying. What I would say is that from all the levels of people that are over him that supervise his authority in the community, it is time to get him engaged with interacting with people that don’t look like him. Because the only reason he makes those statements is because he really does believe that this is true. So how do we change his vision?”

Sanders also said: “Personally, I don’t come from a broken home, I come from a law enforcement environment. But would you know that unless you had a conversation with me?”

Mendez is the founder of Empowering Young Professionals of Long Island, a networking and mentoring group aimed at minority youth. He said Ryder had wrongly generalized that police candidates of color fall short because they come from single-parent households.

Describing Ryder as “blaming the victim,” Mendez said that the commissioner’s characterization “tells me that he’s blind to the needs of the minority communities.”

“If I was the county executive and my commissioner has said that, I would say to that commissioner, ‘You have served the community well up until this point, thank you so much, may I have your resignation?'” Mendez said.

Gross said Ryder’s comments failed to fully account for the role police have played in alienating members of the Island’s minority communities.

“He’s also not taking into account that for a lot of people of color, a lot of people that look like me, their encounters with the police have not been pleasant. And I’m not talking because they have broken the law or because they’re criminals in any way.”

Ryder acknowledged once in the interview that some people of color have negative perceptions of police.

“How do I understand the African American kid that’s been stopped by a car and feels he was not respected because he was stopped because of his color?” Ryder asked. “That may not have been the reason. But so when we have Black officers, Hispanic officers, male, female officers, transgender, LGBTQ, whatever it is that’s out there, if we can relate better, we understand better, we police better. So it’s important that the community sees it. And then they have trust back with us.”

Rahwa Haile, associate professor and a social epidemiologist at SUNY Old Westbury, said poverty rates among Blacks and Hispanics are higher in Nassau than for whites. But studies have shown little difference between family and cultural values among minorities as a whole.

“This stereotype of Black folks and brown folks having been in broken homes, that’s a very old trope that’s been used to describe Black and brown communities, and it’s actually one that’s false,” she said.

Additionally, Ryder asserted that military service gave white applicants an edge over minority candidates.

By state law, veterans get a five-point boost to their written test scores and disabled veterans are awarded 10 extra points. As one result, Ryder said a class hired after a 2018 test was overwhelmingly white — 80 of the 96 recruits were white and, Ryder said, “about half of those were served in the military. So that separates it.”

“A lot of our kids, the white kids, have gone into the military at larger percentage,” Ryder said without offering support for the statement.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense’s most recent demographic report from 2019, Blacks make up 17% of the active force compared with 13% of the population nationwide.

“The commissioner’s comments are not aligned with facts,” said Richard Brookshire, co-founder and executive director of the Black Veterans Project, an advocacy research group. “Blacks serve in the military at higher rates than they are represented in the population.”

Commenting on Ryder’s record in general, Curran wrote in her email that “he has more than met” her expectations for “strengthening relationships with all of our residents.” She also stated that Ryder “is committed to increasing diversity in the NCPD” and wrote that, “Under his tenure, the executive leadership of the police force is the most diverse it has ever been.”

Three of the department’s four chiefs, including the four-star chief of department, Nassau’s highest uniform rank, are Black. Below them a total of 342 officers hold ranks of sergeant or above, according to figures supplied by the department as of March. Of those, 319, or 93%, are white.

In his own email, Ryder pledged a commitment to diversifying the force. He wrote:

“In the past four years I have attended hundreds of community meetings for the purpose of building trust in communities of all races, genders and religions. As I have stated in the past, recruitment practices must always continue to expand with a focus placed on increasing the number of minority officers. This department will continue to work towards a more diverse police department.”

With the approval of the U.S. Justice Department, Nassau and Suffolk counties issued no-bid contracts to testing companies that developed and scored written exams that proved to be unequal gateways for candidates trying to land one of Long Island’s most coveted government jobs.

A primary focus of these tests is that they are not discriminatory toward any race or ethnic group, a mandate of the federal consent decrees that have guided police hiring in both counties since the 1980s. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Since 2003, AON, a human resources consulting firm, has produced Nassau’s police hiring exam. Its latest contract, a 2016 deal worth as much as $1.2 million, paid the company to perform a validity study aimed at identifying characteristics of a good officer by interviewing top performers on the force.

Additionally, the company committed to compare the performance of officers hired over the last 25 years with how they scored on previous hiring tests. The contract also called on AON to produce a sergeant’s promotion exam.

The firm did not respond to multiple interview requests.

“The question that is so key with these tests is this: Have these agencies gone through everything to show us that how you perform on the test really predicts how you’re going to perform on the job?” said David Jones, an organizational psychologist who has developed police exams and reviewed validity studies for the Justice Department.

Suffolk County hired P.S.I. Services with a price cap of $533,550 to produce its most recent test, an exam given in 2019. Two years earlier, P.S.I. Services had taken over a firm that Suffolk had retained for the job every four years since 1998.

The contract covering the 2019 exam required P.S.I. Services to develop the test without performing a new validity study, specifying that the company should base the test on “validity studies completed in 1998, 2002 and 2015.”

While testing experts said that a validity study would not be needed if the job and the characteristics needed to succeed have not changed, it’s good practice to perform one at the start of a hiring cycle.

“It’s something that you just should do for legal compliance and professional standards,” McKay said. “You do it to protect yourself as an organization that’s making hiring decisions.”

A spokeswoman for P.S.I. Services declined to comment.

Pointing out that the Justice Department has consistently accepted exams whose results differed between white and minority test-takers, Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder and former Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said that the testing firms control how exams are prepared and scored. Hart called the process “a frustration” and said the department is “just kind of left to a very arbitrary process.”

The companies closely guard the types of questions faced by would-be officers. A preparation guide posted online by Nassau’s department gave a glimpse into its 2018 exam.

In one section, candidates read a paragraph about laws and procedures and answered multiple-choice questions about how the rules would apply in a fictional scenario. Testing experts said the questions measured reading comprehension.

A second section focused on work experience, with candidates instructed to pick the answer that “most accurately describes your own experiences.”

A sample question asked: “How would a supervisor describe your work habits? A. Best when I work alone; B. Better when I work with one person; C. Better with some people than others; D. Good when I work with anyone; E. I don’t know”

“These are relevant attributes for police as they must work in groups and often must deal with ambiguities, people who are different from them,” McKay said.

The test’s third type of question dealt with “life experience and opinion.” Candidates were asked to agree or disagree with statements such as:

“I prefer to read short articles or summaries rather than lengthy documents,” and, “People say that I’m flexible and open to change.”

Leaetta Hough, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based psychologist who has developed, critiqued and testified about police exams over a 50-year career, said such questions are relevant because “the characteristics they measure are important characteristics for the job.”

What’s the right answer about a candidate’s reading habits? Testing experts interviewed by Newsday disagreed.

Hough chose short stories because the response “likely reflects a preference for being more active rather than sedate, more practical than theoretical.” She said that “police work is more active than passive, with quick decision making rather than slow and deliberate.”

McKay saw the question as trying to pinpoint candidates who exhibited an “openness to experience” and would be less likely to be biased. He said preferring long stories revealed a more curious, open-minded candidate.

Suffolk has not released sample test questions. P.S.I. Services declined to give Newsday a copy of a preparation guide that it provided to past test-takers.

The path to winning appointment to Long Island’s highly paid police forces has been more than three times tougher for Black would-be officers than for white applicants and twice as tough for Hispanic job seekers in recruitment by the Nassau and Suffolk County departments, a Newsday investigation has found.

With thousands more people seeking jobs than the number needed by the two forces, the investigation revealed that since 2012, each county’s hiring process rejected minorities at rates that exceeded a federally established benchmark used to detect evidence of unlawful discrimination.

Candidates for positions on the 2,400-member Nassau County Police Department and the 2,400-member Suffolk County Police Department compete on written exams and then undergo physical fitness tests, psychological screening, medical evaluations and background reviews.

Newsday’s investigation found that at each of those hurdles one or both counties disqualified minority applicants in three rounds of hiring at rates higher than those of their white peers.

The disqualifications help explain how a pool of 2,508 Black applicants generated only 36 Black Nassau County cops in the six years after a 2012 hiring exam, as well as how 1,419 Black applicants for the Suffolk department produced only 16 Black cops in the four years after a 2015 test.

After new rounds of hiring, a total of 6,539 Blacks applied to the Nassau and Suffolk forces in the period studied by Newsday. The departments have hired 67.

Police hiring data reveals barriers to diversity

A Newsday analysis found that minorities who took Nassau and Suffolk police department tests had harder paths to being hired. Faith Jessie reports. Credit: Newsday/Chris Ware, Jim Baumbach, Jeffrey Basinger

Many Black Applicants, Few Black Officers

“To the vast majority of young African American men interested in a good government job such as this, these numbers say your chances of getting through this process are slim to none,” said civil rights attorney Randolph McLaughlin, a professor at Pace University’s School of Law, when informed about Newsday’s findings.

“These numbers tell me there is bias operating in the system, and much more analysis needs to be done by professionals and experts to determine where the block is. You’re not going to be able to get more minorities to get through this system unless you remove the blocks, and there are blocks here.”

McLaughlin added: “Frankly, I think a lawsuit is ready, willing and able, given the numbers that I’m seeing here. It surprises me that someone hasn’t sued again. And if there’s a consent decree, then it may very well be they’re violating it.”

Newsday uncovered the racial and ethnic dynamics behind Long Island’s police hiring by reviewing hundreds of civil service and police documents; interviewing officers, commissioners, civil service officials, testing experts and civil rights attorneys; and by analyzing the histories of 71,600 police candidates.

To conduct that analysis, Newsday calculated how frequently each county filtered out white, Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants at each step of the hiring process.

Four decades ago, the U.S. Justice Department filed civil rights suits against the Nassau and the Suffolk departments with the goal of integrating forces that each were more than 95% white. The counties settled through consent agreements that imposed changes to employment tests and prompted repeated commitments to diversify forces that today remain overwhelmingly white in counties with rising minority populations.

Approaching each round of hiring since then, elected officials and police commissioners asserted that stepped-up recruitment in minority communities would be key to diversifying the forces. The strategy failed.

Suffolk and Nassau County police recruitment images Credit: Newsday illustration

Most starkly, the number of Blacks who sat for Nassau exams fell by nearly half — from 2,055 to 1,213 — between tests in 2012 and 2018. Additionally, barriers uncovered by Newsday’s investigation disproportionately blocked minority candidates after they had aced written tests.

Those obstacles included physical fitness testing that can disqualify even highly conditioned candidates if they have not learned to execute push-ups and sit-ups in precisely required forms, as well as psychological evaluations that eliminated Hispanic and Black and applicants at twice and almost three times the rates of white candidates.

“It’s incredible to me that at every measure Blacks and Latinos are doing worse,” McLaughlin said. “That’s almost impossible. That’s crazy talk. How can that possibly be? Something’s afoot.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Kristina Mastropasqua declined to comment on Newsday’s findings or to make available attorneys responsible for enforcing the department’s consent decrees with Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Official Actions and Community Anger

Newsday interviewed Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder and former Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart about key findings of the investigation, including the rejection of Black applicants at three times the rate of whites, and Hispanic candidates at twice the rate of whites.

Both said that increasing minority representation on the forces would lead to more effective policing and that they have worked to diversify their departments. Ryder said, for example, that he had enhanced the department’s recruiting with a program that enables officers to guide minority job applicants through the hiring process. The Nassau Guardians, the department’s fraternal group of Black officers, presented the idea to Ryder after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered localities to develop policing reform plans following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Hart cited reforms developed after she assigned a seven-officer group to identify steps in the hiring process that had disproportionately winnowed out minority candidates.

“If we keep doing the same thing over and over, how do we expect a different result?” she said. “So, we really tried to change things up a little bit.”

Both commissioners said that ending U.S. Justice Department oversight under four-decade-old federal consent decrees would give them greater flexibility to adopt measures aimed at increasing diversity.

Both called for granting the counties permission to stop administering their own police hiring civil service tests and instead use a state-run exam as the yardstick for selecting candidates.

During his interview, Ryder attributed the department’s inability to attract more minority applicants to the presence of “broken homes” or to a lack of parental support in their communities.

He also said that, compared with white peers, relatively few minority career-seekers have family members who work as police officers and can serve as guides to getting hired.

Four Long Island civil rights leaders said that Ryder had expressed negative and inaccurate stereotypes about Black and Hispanic families as he tried to explain his department’s hiring record.

Civil rights leaders criticize Ryder’s comments

Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder faces criticism that he stereotyped Black and Hispanic families to explain why his department doesn’t attract more minority hiring candidates. Credit: Newsday staff

Two of the leaders said that Ryder’s comments revealed attitudes that merited termination as commissioner. NAACP Long Island Regional Director Tracey Edwards and Luis Mendez, former Nassau deputy director of minority affairs, urged County Executive Laura Curran to ask for Ryder’s resignation.

“Clearly, based on his statements, he is unfit to serve the rich diversity of Nassau County,” Edwards said.

Newsday provided Nassau County Executive Laura Curran with an audio recording of Ryder’s Newsday interview and informed both her and Ryder about the responses to the commissioner’s statements.

Ryder scheduled and then canceled an interview to be recorded regarding the criticism of his comments. In statements released by Curran’s office, both officials expressed commitments to diversifying the police department.

Specifically addressing the criticisms, Ryder wrote: “My intention in my responses was not to be hurtful to anyone but to show how we are continuing to improve recruitment efforts to increase diversity through community outreach and supporting applicants throughout the process.”

Curran wrote: “I do not believe lack of diversity in law enforcement is tied to family make-up.”

Little Change After Four Decades of Federal Oversight

Under the Justice Department’s supervision, the 40-year effort to increase minority representation helped change the Nassau and Suffolk forces from 95% white to roughly 85% white. Over the same period, population trends bolstered the minority presence in both counties and reduced the white share of the populations — to 68% in Suffolk and 60% in Nassau, according to Census estimates.

As a result, neither department mirrors the community it patrols.

“I hate to say it, not much has changed,” said Suffolk Det. Earl Stroman, who was assigned as a police officer in the early 1990s to recruit minorities to join the Suffolk Department.

As of March this year, he was among the 2,400-member department’s 61 Black officers – identical to the number on the force two decades ago. Over the same period, Nassau’s roster of Black officers fell from 110 to 103.

After a 35-year law enforcement career, Stroman urges minorities to consider joining the force. In an interview, he expressed pride in police work and cited the possibility of earning $200,000-plus incomes as good cause for applying for jobs. He also recognized a gulf between the police at large and many minority community members while saying that he, too, had experienced being stopped by officers for no reason other than driving in a white neighborhood.

Stroman, who is the father of Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman, also recounted how he had taught his son to comply if pulled over while driving and detailed a 2017 incident in which police in Florida forced Marcus to lie face-down on the street during a routine traffic stop.

“I always say maybe Black officers have no home,” Stroman said. “It’s tough for us to take a side, it really is.”

Earl Stroman, Suffolk County police detective and father of Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman, spoke about being a Black police officer on Long Island for 35 years. Credit: Newsday/Chris Ware

Nassau and Suffolk’s Hispanic representation grew by more than half since 2000, with Suffolk’s increase aided by a mandate, approved by the Justice Department, that 10% of each academy class must be fluent in Spanish for communication purposes. Still, each department would need to roughly double its Hispanic ranks to bring them in line with the Hispanic share of the population.

Nassau and Suffolk have embarked on new hiring programs. In Nassau, the makeup of the first 281 recruits, hired in late 2019 and 2020, was 87% white, 6% Hispanic, 4% Black and 2% Asian.

In April, Suffolk swore in 104 officers, heralded by county officials as the most diverse rookie class in department history: 72% white, 23% Hispanic and 4% Black. The federally approved mandate that sets aside 10% of Suffolk’s slots for Spanish-speakers helped increase the Hispanic presence in the class.

Those hiring efforts brought the total number of Black applicants to 6,539 and the total hired to 67.

6,539 Blacks applied to the Nassau and Suffolk forces in the nine years studied by Newsday.

67 were hired by the departments.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that employment standards, such as civil service exams, that appear fair may still unlawfully discriminate if they have an “adverse impact” on minority applicants.

Courts and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have used a so-called four-fifths rule to judge whether hiring practices show such an adverse impact. If minorities meet requirements less than four-fifths of the times that whites make the grade, an employer can be found in violation of civil rights laws — unless the employer proves that its standards are reasonably related to job demands.

Do job qualifications discriminate? The government uses arithmetic to find out.

Its formula is called the four-fifths rule. Here’s how it works. Credit: Newsday/Jeffrey Basinger and Jim Baumbach

From the written test through physical, psychological and medical screening, multiple steps in Long Island’s police hiring showed adverse impacts on minorities — with the effect of supporting white representation on the forces.

In the seven years studied by Newsday, for example, white applicants composed a total of 62% of the would-be officers — and they won a higher share (82%) of the jobs. Conversely, Blacks represented 9% of the applicants but secured a lower share (4%) of the jobs.

Awarding badges to Blacks at an equal proportion to whites would have increased Black representation by almost three times that number: 225 cops. Meeting the four-fifths rule would have translated to 180 Black hires.

“This is clear evidence that the counties have not taken upon themselves to change their process,” said Rodney Coates, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, when informed of Newsday’s findings. “And this is clear evidence that it is not the people, it is the process. It is the system that needs to change.”

Minorities Fell, Whites Rose from Test to Jobs

Winning a police officer’s job on Long Island starts with written examinations offered every four to six years.

The tests are governed by civil service rules that are designed to ensure merit-based hiring. The Justice Department oversees how the tests are developed and scored. Candidates are not graded on whether they know subjects like criminal law and police procedures. Instead, the questions focus on skills that are necessary to serve well as an officer, such as reading comprehension.

Private companies design and score police hiring exams — and perform so-called validity studies to demonstrate that top test scores are good predictors of on-the-job success.

The Nassau and Suffolk civil service agencies have awarded no-bid contracts to testing firms whose exams scored whites and minorities at levels that exceeded the four-fifths standard and excluded minority test-takers at increasing rates compared with whites.

A round of hiring conducted by Suffolk’s department from 2015 through 2019 provides a case study of how the multistep employment systems used by both counties have sifted white, Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants.

Hart instructed the department in 2018 to determine for the first time how often each step of the hiring process had eliminated candidates of different races or ethnicities. The review serves as the basis for the most comprehensive analysis to date of how the process played out on a Long Island force.

The Nassau department has never publicly tabulated similar data. At Newsday’s request, the county’s Civil Service Commission reviewed the county’s hiring process. The commission provided information about the race or ethnicity of applicants who were eliminated since 2012 at each step for both the county police department and 18 smaller municipal forces. The commission was not able to limit the data to the county department. Even so, Nassau’s information indicated that the outcome of Suffolk’s 2015 hiring was broadly representative.

A Diverse Field Took Suffolk’s Hiring Test:

11,325 White

3,564 Hispanic

1,419Black

385Asians

The test-takers were more diverse than Suffolk’s overall population: 66% white, 21% Hispanic, 8% Black and 2% Asian, compared with a population that was 70% white, 18% Hispanic, 7% Black and 4% Asian, according to U.S. Census estimates.

The test had a passing grade of 70. Those who fell below the mark were eliminated from consideration.

Matching the composition of the passing group against the starting field, whites passed more frequently than Black, Hispanic or Asian job seekers, with the difference crossing the four-fifths rule for Blacks.

White representation among the candidates still in the running climbed from 66% to 71% while the proportions of Hispanics and Blacks fell to 19% and 6%. Asians remained steady at 2%. The remainder was composed of members of other groups.

Amid fierce competition, the county advanced only candidates who scored a higher grade — 95.

Top Scores Narrowed the Field to:

2,735 White

613 Hispanic

216Black

61Asian

With those results, white representation climbed again — to 74% — while the proportions of Blacks, Hispanics and Asians inched down. The outcomes broke the four-fifths standard.

White test-takers hit the mark that made them eligible for potential hiring 60% more frequently than Black test-takers and 41% more often than Hispanic applicants.

White Test-takers Succeeded About 1.5X More Often than Minorities

“Minorities would have a case to charge discrimination,” said Leaetta Hough, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based psychologist who has developed, critiqued and testified about police exams over a 50-year career.

After a Hiring Lottery, Candidates Still in the Running Were:

1,624 White

308 Hispanic

131Black

41Asians

The total number of top-scorers was far greater than the number of officers Suffolk expected to hire over the next four years. It used a lottery to select which applicants to call for additional screening. Each name was pulled at random from a bingo cage in a drawing that lasted hours.

Guided by chance, the lottery reduced the ranks of applicants under consideration at roughly equal rates for all groups.

Although they were picked in the lottery, some applicants failed to appear when called for an orientation session.

Officials said they believe many of them had moved on to other careers because, following standard procedure, the department conducted hiring as its ranks thinned out. The intervals between taking a test and getting called were unpredictable and spanned as long as four years.

At orientation, the department gave applicants a 34-page questionnaire that delved into their backgrounds, including criminal history, driving record, credit record and the types and locations of tattoos. Some candidates never returned the questionnaire and were dropped from consideration.

More applicants later withdrew as the process continued. Suffolk did not track when in the hiring process any of these candidates dropped out.

Additionally, the department did not record how many applicants proceeded to take the physical fitness, psychological and medical tests. At those steps, it logged only candidates who were eliminated and not those who passed. Without knowing the number of candidates who advanced, it is impossible to calculate a pass-fail rate for each race or ethnicity at each step.

To understand the impact each obstacle had on the pool of police candidates, Newsday instead measured the number of candidates disqualified against the maximum possible number of applicants who were still in the running.

Job-hunt Dropouts Cut Ranks to:

1,356 White

234 Hispanic

100Black

38Asians

After returning the background packet, candidates next faced the precision-form physical fitness exam.

Under state regulations, Long Island’s police forces subject applicants to a fitness test that is aimed at measuring whether they have the capacity to learn how to do push-ups and sit-ups by exact standards, as well as whether they show the ability to serve as an officer, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.

Fitness Examiners Failed Blacks 1.6X More than Members of Other Groups

To meet the standards — described by physical training experts as poorly designed – some candidates have hired coaches to teach them how to maintain form while doing the exercises.

James Pierre-Glaude, an assistant professor at the Stony Brook School of Health, Technology and Management who specializes in athletic training, said in an interview that the standards reward athletes who train specifically to meet them rather than determine physical fitness.

Pierre-Glaude said that he has coached 15 to 20 Long Island police hiring candidates in how to perform situps and pushups as required. These candidates — all but one was white — “knew to the T what was expected of them, as if it was drilled into them.”

“You need some standards, absolutely, but to penalize a candidate that might have passed the test because they weren’t sure of the technicalities is not good for the candidate and not good for the department,” he said. “You end up picking people who know the standards, not all of the candidates who are physically fit.”

How to pass fitness test – Suffolk video excerpt.

In addition to pushups and situps, candidates must complete a timed 1.5-mile run.

With the penalties for breaking form on the situps and pushups as stiff as disqualification, police academy staff failed the Black candidates 60% more often than white, Hispanic and Asian applicants.

Asked to explain why fitness tests resulted in adverse impacts on Blacks, Suffolk Deputy Police Commissioner Risco Mention-Lewis said that minority candidates are less likely to have family members who “have prior military or law enforcement experience.”

“We didn’t believe this was an agility issue, we believe it’s a precision issue,” Mention-Lewis said in an interview. “We believe it’s more not understanding that you have to do exactly this way.”

Training experts said the regimen is ill-suited to discover whether candidates are fit for the special demands of policing.

“There’s better, more accurate ways out there,” that measure ability to perform the types of actions that officers can encounter at work, said Paul Davis, founder of the First Responder Institute, which develops fitness exams for law enforcement agencies. “How many officers have had to pull (their) cruiser over, jump out and do sit-ups?”

In contrast to sit-ups, push-ups and a run, the New York Police Department requires candidates to perform actions that simulate on-the-job challenges, such as climbing a 6-foot wall, withstanding the force of a physical restraint and dragging a 176-pound mannequin while wearing a 14-pound weight vest.

Nassau’s department uses the same state-mandated protocols as Suffolk. There, examiners failed Black applicants at twice the rate of white candidates and disqualified Hispanic test-takers 40% more often than whites in a hiring process that started in 2012.

“It’s a story I would hear over and over again,” said retired Suffolk detective sergeant Ken Williams, recalling that young Black men in apparently good physical condition had spoken about failing the Nassau fitness test while they were students in criminal justice classes he taught at Suffolk Community College.

The fitness test cut black applicants by a third.

After the Fitness Test, Candidates Still in the Running Were:

1,120 White

192 Hispanic

72Black

33Asians

A company that described itself as “experts in psychological risk management” has evaluated the mental and emotional fitness of candidates for police jobs in Suffolk County for two decades. Its clinicians disqualified Black candidates nearly three times more often than white applicants and Hispanic candidates at double the rate of whites.

Responding to Newsday’s questions, Suffolk’s Department of Human Resources, Personnel and Civil Service ordered Stone, McElroy & Associates to publicly report for the first time how frequently it found white, Black and Hispanic applicants suitable or unsuitable for hiring.

Psychological Testers Failed Blacks Almost 3X as Often as Whites, Hispanics 2X as Often    

The company responded with statistics that covered hiring by all police departments across Suffolk, including both the 2,400-member county force and the smaller municipal forces.

The Georgia-based firm disclosed that, during the 2015 exam’s four-year hiring period, its clinicians recommended for employment 84% of white candidates who were screened, 67% of Hispanic applicants and 57% of the Black hopefuls.

Conversely, Stone, McElroy recommended against hiring 16% of white candidates, 33% of the Hispanic applicants and 43% of the Black job seekers.

“These numbers speak to something being wrong with the system,” said Adwoa Akhu, a former president of the New York Association of Black Psychologists who teaches New York Police Department hostage negotiators about communication and de-escalation methods.

“These are supposed to be the cream of the crop candidates because they’ve made it through all of these other hurdles, so you’d expect the pass rates here to be similar, but they’re not for the people of color. It shouldn’t be such a huge disparity.”

Acting on Stone, McElroy’s recommendations, Suffolk disqualified police candidates far more frequently than Nassau has. All told, Suffolk declined to hire 193 applicants on mental or emotional grounds — four times the number of rejections issued by Nassau during a period when Nassau hired twice as many officers.

Stone, McElroy boasts a client list of several dozen law enforcement agencies. The civil service department has most recently paid it $985,000 under a contract signed in 2016. Managing partner Heather McElroy responded to Newsday questions in emails that she forwarded to county officials.

Asked about her company’s figures showing that it had recommended against hiring Blacks at almost three times the rate of whites, and Hispanics at double the rate of whites, McElroy stated that the Suffolk police department had scheduled psychological evaluations before the department had finished background investigations.

She wrote that the process had the effect of “inflating the number of candidates who were not recommended.” She did not explain why that would cause clinicians to recommend against hiring Blacks and Hispanics at greater rates than whites.

Suffolk police spokeswoman Dawn Schob said the department has since shifted to completing background investigations before scheduling psychological evaluations.

In its latest round of hiring, the department has called the first 362 candidates who scored at the top on a test given in 2019. Stone, McElroy recommended hiring 10 of the first 12 Black candidates, a pass rate of 83% compared with rates of 78% for white applicants and 68% for Hispanics, according to statistics the firm provided to the county.

McElroy said the changed process “appears to have increased the pass rate of Black candidates at the psychological evaluation.” Again, she did not explain why.

She also wrote “whatever the impact of the test,” on members of different races or ethnicities, “there is strong evidence that the evaluation is predictive of desirable outcomes for all involved, including the community.”

After Psychological Testing, Candidates Still in the Running Were:

1,018 White

167 Hispanic

58Black

29Asians

Medical examinations ran applicants through the equivalent of annual physical exams, from vision and hearing tests to blood pressure, heart and respiratory screenings.

The tests eliminated only 36 candidates — 26 white, five Black and five Hispanic. Although the numbers are small, they reflected different failure rates among the groups when compared with the applicant pool: 3.8% for Blacks, 1.6% for whites and Hispanics, 0% for Asians.

The Suffolk County Department of Health Services’ Office of Employee Health conducted the physicals.

Medical Testers Failed Blacks More Often than Others

“The number of blacks who failed the medical exam, I’d want to look at why that is,” said Hough, the psychologist who has developed and testified about police hiring tests for decades. She cautioned against drawing conclusions without detailed information from the examinations.

After Medical Exams, Candidates Still in the Running Were:

992 White

162 Hispanic

53Black

29Asians

Background Investigations and Hiring Decisions

Police officers delve into the past of their future colleagues by interviewing neighbors and employers, contacting schools that were attended and reviewing credit reports. Candidates must disclose everything from their driving records, bank account balances, tattoo locations, and gambling bets with bookmakers to whether they’ve ever reported a passport as lost.

In hiring based on the 2015 test, Suffolk officers both conducted those investigations and decided who passed and who failed. They also encouraged applicants to withdraw to avoid the lasting stigma of having failed background investigations.

As a result, the department does not have an accurate count of applicants whose records included allegedly disqualifying information. Its statistics lump those individuals among the candidates who withdrew for personal reasons, making it impossible to gauge the impact of background investigations by race or ethnicity.

Hart stripped officers of the powers to both investigate applicants and decide whether they should be disqualified. The investigators now refer their findings to civil service officials for determinations of who passes and who fails. Disqualifications are tallied by race and ethnicity.

In Nassau, a three-member Civil Service Commission reviews background investigations and rules on whether the police department may hire candidates. The three commissioners are former County Attorney Carnell Foskey, Nassau County Democratic Committee vice chairman Steven Markowitz and former Nassau University Medical Center executive Michael DeLuca.

The commissioners are appointed by the Nassau County executive and approved by the Legislature. Markowitz and DeLuca became commissioners in April, replacing Seaford attorney Alan Parente and former U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman.

Candidates fail background investigations most frequently based on criminal records, evidence of recent drug use, or driving histories with numerous tickets or accidents, Parente said in an interview.

The police department provides the commissioners with a form that summarizes investigative findings without disclosing a candidate’s race or ethnicity.

Cumulatively, Suffolk’s drop-outs — including candidates told they were going to fail background investigations — eliminated nearly a third of the candidates called for processing.

How Many Applied and How Many Were Hired

A chance to serve on the Suffolk County Police Department sparked high interest.

More than 30 applicants took the written exam for each job that eventually became available. The field started with 17,055 hopefuls, including 11,325 whites, 3,564 Hispanics, 1,419 Blacks and 385 Asians. They competed for what turned out to be 505 job openings.

The written test and the hiring lottery quickly reduced the number to 2,845 competitors who were eligible to continue through the physical, psychological, medical and background screening. They included 1,624 whites, 308 Hispanics, 131 Blacks and 41 Asians.

From the Lottery to a Job

Over four years, Suffolk’s department hired a total of 505 officers in eight police academy classes. A pool of applicants that started at 66% white when they took the test finished as a cadre of police recruits that was 87% white.

Conversely, the representation of Hispanics and Blacks fell by more than half — to 9% and 3% respectively, levels well below each group’s population share.

To further grasp the impact of the process on minorities, consider that of those candidates who aced the test, were selected in the lottery and were lucky enough to get called for processing: 27% of whites won jobs, compared with 15% of Hispanics, 12% of Blacks and 12% of Asians.

The Department Hired Whites Who Came Through Lottery at 2X Rate of Other Groups.

27% of whites

15% of Hispanics

12% of Blacks

12%of Asians

“There appears to be some form of bias or something operating that skews the numbers to favor white applicants,” said Ronnie Dunn, chief diversity officer and associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University. “I find it amazing they’ve been under a consent decree for 40 years and haven’t made any substantive progress in addressing that.”

Case Study Shows Patterns

The evidence of adverse impacts uncovered by Newsday extended beyond Suffolk’s police hiring in the four years after 2015. It appeared also in subsequent hiring by Suffolk as well as in two rounds conducted by Nassau County.

Suffolk is roughly at the halfway mark in a recruiting program begun in 2019. It provided Newsday data showing how many hopefuls applied to become officers and how many scored high enough on the written test to enter the hiring lottery. At the same time, the county declined to disclose how many candidates passed or failed at later steps, such as the physical fitness and psychological tests.

The data revealed that gaps in the performance of white and minority test-takers widened compared with how the groups fared on the previous exam. White candidates achieved top scores and entered the lottery.

• 65% more frequently than black candidates – up from 60% on the 2015 test
• 56% more often than Hispanic candidates – up from 40% on the 2015 test
• 52% more frequently than Asian candidates – about the same as on the 2015 test

The Nassau County Police Department completed one hiring effort and has partially finished a second during the period studied by Newsday.

Those who signed up for the 2012 police test appear to represent the most diverse applicant pool of the four tests studied by Newsday. Of the 20,352 candidates, partial statistics kept by the county show that 56% were white, 17% Hispanic, 12% Black and 6% other, while 10% did not provide their race or ethnicity.

White and minority applicants passed Nassau’s written hiring exam at rates that appear to indicate the test has not adversely impacted minorities. This exam produced passing rates of 63% for whites, 55% for Hispanics and 51% for Blacks — margins within the four-fifths standard. The county did not break out how Asians performed that year.

But in practice, simply passing the test has nothing to do with getting a job.

Only candidates who have achieved peak possible scores — well above the passing grade –have chances of employment. That group was composed largely of white applicants, but its exact makeup is unknown because the civil service system has not tracked the race or ethnicity of test-takers at different scoring levels. They are called in rank order from the top for additional screening.

Among that group, the county’s civil service department called whites 33% more frequently than Blacks and 12% more often than Hispanics.

“There is adverse impact here, clearly,” said Patrick McKay, a Temple University industrial and organizational psychology professor who has developed police exams.

As in Suffolk, Nassau’s physical fitness examiners eliminated minorities at greater rates than whites — cutting Black candidates twice as frequently as white applicants. Many of the examiners are retired physical education teachers. They failed at least half of the Blacks they reviewed, at least one-third of the Hispanic applicants and one-quarter of the white job seekers.

Background investigations conducted by police officers and reviewed by a three-member civil service board had a similar disparate impact on minorities. They knocked out at least half of the Black candidates who were scrutinized, compared with one-quarter of the Hispanic applicants and one-quarter of the whites whose records were examined.

“We don’t know their racial breakdown, their religious preference, sexual orientation, nothing like that,” said former board member Parente.

Medical checks in Nassau disqualified roughly 3% of the candidates of each race or ethnicity. Psychological evaluations eliminated Blacks at more than twice the rate of white and Hispanic candidates, but the numbers cut were small: 30 whites, six Blacks and four Hispanics.

Net outcome: The Nassau County Police Department hired 927 police officers who posted top test scores and made it through screening: 84% were white, 10% Hispanic and 4% Black.

The process transformed a cadre whose composition started roughly in line with the county’s population into recruits whose white makeup was 26 percentage points higher than the white share of the population — while cutting Black and Hispanic representations to about half their county presences.

“That’s a dramatic underrepresentation of the population, so that’s a red flag for the administrators that says something’s wrong here,” said Wayne Cascio, a University of Colorado management professor who has developed police tests.

An eight-person state board appointed by the governor sets the fitness test standards and requires police agencies outside New York City to measure fitness by precisely executed situps and pushups, plus a run. Breaking form can result in immediate disqualification.

The proper form for sit-ups, according to a Suffolk video.

In a notice to municipalities, the Municipal Police Training Council wrote that, while “these elements may not be directly representative of essential job functions to be performed by an entry-level police officer,” they do “measure the candidate’s physiological capacity to learn and perform the essential job functions.”

A spokeswoman for the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services confirmed the state’s view that pushups, situps and a run demonstrates a candidate’s ability to “safely learn and perform essential job functions of a police officer.”

Both counties describe the test as an agility test. The New York Police Department takes a different approach in what it calls a “job standard test” that is designed to simulate on-the-job challenges.

In addition to climbing a six-foot wall, withstanding the force of a physical restraint system and dragging a 176-pound mannequin 35 feet, candidates must also run up and down six steps of stairs three times, sprint around cones, and pull the trigger of an inoperative firearm 16 times in one hand and 15 times in the other.

A screenshot of the NYPD jobs standard test explainer video, depicting steps in their version of the physical fitness exam.

They wear a 14-pound weight vest throughout the test and must complete the tasks in 4 minutes and 28 seconds. The standards are the same regardless of age or gender.

On Long Island, under state rules, the required number of pushups ranges from 29 for men who are younger than 30 years old to 11 pushups for women who are 30 years old and above. There is no time limit. Candidates are permitted to stop during the exercise but only with their arms extended and elbows locked.

While in motion, they are barred from breaking a set form. Among the rules: applicants must lock elbows at the top of the pushup, keep backs straight and lower their chests to touch a padded foam block for a repetition to count. Per Suffolk’s video, a momentarily flexed back results in a warning, and a second infraction “terminates the test” in failure. Touching a knee or torso to the floor also fails a candidate.

How to pass fitness test – Suffolk video excerpt.

The situp test is timed. Candidates have one minute to complete repetitions specified for their ages and genders. That ranges from 38 for men who are younger than 30 years old to 25 for women who are 30 years old and above.

Candidates perform situps while on a board with their knees bent and their ankles under a bar. Candidates interlock fingers behind their heads and must keep them fully interlocked through the exercise. If fingers slip apart on a repetition, that repetition is stricken from the count. On the way up, the back must remain straight at all points and elbows must pass the knees. Rounding the back, performing a crunch-style situp or failing to move elbows past knees drops a repetition from the count.

On the way down, hips must remain grounded and shoulder blades must touch the board. Violating either of those standards eliminates a repetition. If a candidate stops to rest during the minute, the test is terminated in failure.

The rules governing the 1.5-mile run deal only with time. The cap ranges from 12:38 for men under the age of 30 to 15:43 for women in their 30s.

Videos on both counties’ websites lay out what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Former Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said the department is trying to combat the preparation advantage that some candidates enjoy by granting candidates who fail four weeks before retaking the test, up from two weeks. Nassau counts a failure as final.

Alfred Titus, a former New York Police Department hostage negotiator and homicide detective investigator, said he probably would have failed the test when he was in prime athletic shape — unless he had studied the instructional videos.

“It is too strict, there are some things that don’t make sense,” he said, referencing as examples the requirement to interlock fingers behind the head during situps and prohibiting candidates from pausing during the one-minute time cap on situps.

Titus, who is Black, also said that unfamiliarity with the standards places Blacks at a disadvantage.

“The minority communities are not familiar with the requirements and don’t have the tips and inside info from their families,” he said.