KCK seeks to hire more minorities and women for public safety jobs

Wyandotte County crossed the demographic divide a few years ago when minority residents began to outnumber white residents there.

Still, you wouldn’t know Wyandotte was the only majority-minority county in the metro area by the skin tones of its police, firefighters and sheriff’s deputies.

While non-Hispanic whites account for just 40 percent of the county’s overall population, they make up two-thirds of the sheriff’s department. Nearly three-fourths of the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department is white, as are four out of every five city firefighters.

Now comes a new report suggesting ways to make the public safety workforce better reflect the community it serves. The changes are aimed not only at increasing minority hiring but also at opening more opportunities for women, who are also under-represented by a wide margin in those departments.

It’s far too early to know whether the recommendations will achieve the results Mayor Mark Holland was seeking when he took on the issue more than a year ago. But even addressing that lack of diversity after years of inaction and seeming indifference is seen by some as a positive sign.

“We understand everything can’t be done overnight, but it’s a very good start,” said Kansas City, Kan., firefighter Terrance Henderson, president of the local chapter of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters.

Longtime civil rights activist Alvin Sykes agreed, but he’s not celebrating just yet.

“Five years from now, if people look and see there is no significant change,” he said, “this will be viewed as a failure from the community standpoint.”

Sykes was one of 40 members of the Mayor’s Public Safety Recruitment Task Force, which turned in its recommendations this week to the Unified Government Board of Commissioners.

The board approved the measures Thursday night, although some of the changes are subject to passage of the Unified Government budget this summer.

Broadly speaking, the recommendations call for more intensive recruitment of Wyandotte County young people, fewer or relaxed prerequisites for job applicants, as well as more openness about the reasons some job applicants aren’t hired and those already on staff are denied promotions.

Currently, many walk away with no explanation.

One significant change suggested: Fire Department applicants would no longer be required to get emergency medical technician certification before being considered for employment.

For some low-income minorities, that can be a deal killer. Without being assured it will lead to a job, many say they cannot afford to pay for the required coursework at Kansas City, Kan., Community College.

The task force suggests letting new hires work toward EMT certification on the job the way some other fire departments already do. Across the state line, in the other Kansas City, training is done in-house, as it was in Kansas City, Kan., prior to 1993.

“We’re not lowering the standards at all for our Fire Department,” Holland said. “You’ll still need an EMT before you get on a truck.”

But not everyone on the task force supported the change because of the cost involved with training EMTs.

“The city doesn’t have the money for that,” said Unified Government Commissioner Mike Kane.

But Holland said the cost would be minimal and might be covered by efficiencies recommended in an upcoming report on the department’s finances. The city spends $52 million a year on fire protection, when Topeka, a city of similar size, only spends half that much.

Holland said any savings found in the fire budget could also go toward the $1.4 million to $3 million it might cost to beef up the cadet programs at the fire, police and sheriff’s departments.

Those programs make up the most costly recommendation in the public safety report. Most of the others would cost little or nothing and lead to a bigger hiring pool of minority and female applicants, Holland said.

One suggestion that received broad support lowers the minimum age for applying to the Fire Department from 21 to 19.

That’s more in line with other fire departments in the area. In Overland Park, 18 is the minimum, while it’s 19 in Kansas City.

While the Fire Department is more heavily white and male than the police and sheriff’s departments, public safety agencies across the nation are predominantly white and male.

That lack of diversity was one focus of the national discussion set off last summer with the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. It has only intensified since then with each new report of an unarmed black male dying after police confrontations in places like New York, Cleveland and Baltimore.

Holland’s concerns arose before Ferguson when he attended a graduation cermony for new firefighters in the fall of 2013. Of the 42 cadets in that class and a subsequent one, all but one graduate (a Hispanic) were white, and there was just one woman.

Holland later learned that only 25 percent of those hires were graduates of Wyandotte County high schools, which to Holland meant that young people in his community were missing out on some good-paying jobs close to home.

Further study with help from the U.S. Department of Justice showed similar challenges in the police and sheriff’s departments.

Holland formed his task force last fall. Its members included representatives from all three public safety agencies and people from the community. The goal was to propose reforms that would increase minority job applicants and address real and seeming unfairness in the hiring system.

“One such perception is nepotism,” said task force member William Barajas, a 30-year Kansas City, Kan., police officer who is president of the local chapter of the National Latino Peace Officers Association. “Most people I spoke to during my career asked me who I was related to or knew to get the job.”

Barajas got in on his own, with no one pulling strings.

Holland said the task force found no overt discrimination. But he said some policies, such as the one requiring EMT certification, had the unintended consequence of dissuading some minority applicants from applying for public safety jobs.

The departments also need to do a better job of actively seeking out women and minority applicants, the task force said.

“Recruiting is more than just putting an ad in the paper,” said Henderson, who wasn’t on the panel but whose organization was represented.

Sykes said it’s a challenge promoting law enforcement as a career when police have such a negative imagine among minorities.

That’s not just a Wyandotte County issue, though.

“The big elephant in the room,” he said, “is improving police-community relations to the point that people would feel proud being a member of public safety.”

Several elements of the task force recommendations are aimed at that, such as having dedicated recruiters working more closely with area high schools.

But Holland said it won’t be a quick or easy fix.

“It’s going to take us a while to get there,” he said.

This story was originally published June 4, 2015 at 6:02 PM with the headline "KCK seeks to hire more minorities and women for public safety jobs."