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Seventy-one percent of Black officers at the police department in Knoxville, Tennessee in the U.S. said they have experienced discrimination by the organization, according to a recent report conducted by 21CP Solutions, an organization of policing experts.
"If you are a Black officer, you have to work five times harder, and officers will always second-guess you," one anonymous officer was quoted as saying in the report.
"When applying for posted positions and training, if more than one Black officer applied for a job that has multiple open slots, only one Black officer would get selected, and the other one would be told to wait until the next posting," said another officer.
A protester stands in the street in front of the Akron City Justice Center in Akron, Ohio, July 2, 2022. /CFP
Knoxville Police Department's new chief, Paul Noel, told NBC News in an interview that 21CP Solutions' assessment was commissioned by him, noting that takeaways from the report are "pretty clear."
"These are all things that people in the community and the police department anecdotally knew," he was quoted as saying. "But this is the first time we had a jumping-off point to actually create change."
The findings come after years of allegations, covered by the Knoxville News Sentinel, of longstanding racist behavior in the department, serving a town of over 180,000 people in eastern Tennessee.
Black representation in U.S. police forces has long been hampered by discrimination in hiring and promotion, some law enforcement officers told Reuters as early as 2020.
U.S. police forces remain generally whiter than the community that surrounds them, despite decades of attempts to reform, according to U.S. Federal data released in 2020.
(With input from agencies)
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Copyright © 2023 CGTN. 京ICP备16065310号
Disinformation report hotline: 010-85061466