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The demographics of Columbia’s police force don’t reflect the city’s general population, but Chief Ken Burton said more internal decisions need to be made about how the department wants to serve the community before any new plan is made to address the issue.
After what has been a yearlong shift in departmental philosophy and structure, Columbia police are starting to evaluate officer diversity. Burton spoke to the Columbia Citizens Police Review Board last week about his department’s struggles to “mirror” the community it serves in terms of its ethnicity and what the department should look like in years to come.
Before the department can figure that out, though, he said, it needs to complete its shift toward geographic policing and set more leadership positions. “As we get geographic policing in order, we will be better at telling you how many officers we are in need of,” he said.
Also, to better determine how police should serve the community, data are being collected to figure out what cities Columbia can model. Burton said that is difficult because few cities Columbia’s size have the higher education, downtown life, form of city government and industry Columbia has, he said.
As of June 9, the Columbia police force included 156 filled positions. Those broke down to 116 white male officers, 26 white female officers, nine black male officers, one black female officer and four male officers of other ethnicity. By unit, that includes 125 officers in patrol, 20 in the investigative and street crime units and the rest in narcotics, training and recruitment, professional standards and administration units.
More: http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/jul/22/police-look-at-officer-diversity/
Posted Friday, July 23rd 2010 at 12:43PM
by: Elynor Moss
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