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.