Defund the Police? Check

On Monday a screenshot of a message came across my feed.

According to a source within the Memphis PD, the 5 charged officers weren’t hired through the usual structured PD hiring process. City leaders felt the existing process was too strict and kept certain people from getting jobs at the department. City leaders began their own hiring process and then pushed new hires into the agency, bypassing the testing procedures in place at the department. You can read between the lines what that all means.

All 5 of the charged officers were hired by the City, and didn’t go through the rigorous PD testing process. This is what quota hiring looks like. Lawsuits and dead innocents. The city should pay the lawsuits instead of the Police department. This Murder wasn’t created by old school policing or by “white supremacy”. This murder was directly facilitated by liberal policy
— Chief of Police, Karan Parmar via linkedin post

Given that this was just a screen shot it wasn’t trustworthy. Not enough to talk about.

Today an article from the New York Post there was confirmation.

At least two out of of five Memphis police officers charged with murder in the fatal beatdown of Tyre Nichols joined the force after the department relaxed its hiring requirements.

Not quite the same as what Parmar posted, but interesting.

Recruits no longer needed an associate’s degree or 54 college credit hours to join the force, and could get by with five years of work experience, Action 5 reported.

Loosening the required qualifications however means that the department is ultimately getting “less desirable” job candidates, Mike Alcazar, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired NYPD detective, told The Post.

“They’re desperate. They want police officers,” Alcazar said. “They’re going through it, they check off some boxes, saying, ‘Ok, they’re good enough, get them on.”
— Memphis cops charged in Tyre Nichols murder hired after PD relaxed job requirements

The Memphis police are down more than 500 men and is offering $15,000 signing bonuses. It does sound like a DEI hire.

Add to this a newly signed bill (unverified by me) in California that say that illegal aliens are now able to get jobs as law enforcement officers.

As more and more substandard people are hired as law enforcement the more the people that actually care and are good are likely to leave the job.

One of the issues with minimum wages that isn’t talked about is that when you raise the rate of the lowest, you have to raise the rate of those above them. I know a couple of people that quit when they found out the new person just hired that reported to them was making more than they were.

If you have some section lead that has been struggling for years to work their way up from $7.50/hr and is now making $14.50/hr and suddenly the guy they just hired to mop floors is making $15/hour his $0.50 raise doesn’t feel all that good.