By Doug Miller
Long Island ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a group that has traditionally worked with minority clients in search of housing, has joined with the Rev. Delores Miller of the Evangel Revival Community Church in Long Beach in her crusade to diversify the 70-plus-member department.
The rally, scheduled to take place after the Herald's deadline, was intended to precede "members going into the Long Beach police precinct to present a letter for Police Commissioner Thomas Sofield, Sr. urging the hiring of African American police officers by the end of 2006," according to an announcement faxed to the Herald. Sofield did not return a call for comment.
The letter cites census data to back up its claim that minorities are under-represented in the department. "If the 78-member police force reflected our cities [sic] population percentages, approximately 65 would be White, 9 Latino, 3 African American, and 1 Asian," it reads. "A LBPD like this could be an even more modern, professional, full service department dedicated to providing intelligent, sincere, efficient, and courteous service to the citizens of Long Beach."
As for the crayons, Jeremy Mitchell, the Brooklyn-based ACORN official who was organizing the Long Beach event, said his people would be well-armed. "We have over 120 boxes of those eight-packs," he said. "We have 10 or 12 of those big Crayola boxes. So we got as many crayons as we could find because we wanted to give them to people in the community as well to raise awareness in a way that's not so threatening. The police may not think it's funny, though."
While no data is available on the exact ethnic breakdown of the department, a police official conceded that there are currently no black police officers in the department, a situation, Mitchell said, that leads to mistrust. "Some people in the community still have a fear of the Long Beach police because of the history," he said.
When asked which history he was referring to, Mitchell replied, "Brutality would probably be a harsh word, but some would use it." When asked to give an example, he described a police investigation that resulted in a woman's being blocked in her driveway by a police car and later being the subject of a warrant, a story police dismissed as fictional.
Long Beach Police Lt. Bruce Meyer defended his department and said that, ultimately, he was glad Wednesday's confrontation would take place, because it would give him an opportunity to clear the department's name on racial issues. In addition to being the commanding officer of the department's records division, Meyer is in charge of vetting and hiring new officers. He said that he and Sofield have made the recruitment of black police officers a priority.
To that end, last December the department offered a special police test - just one year after a previous one failed to find any black "eligibles," as qualified potential employees are known in the parlance of civil service law. The second test, which was open to anyone, not just Long Beach residents, revealed about 33 eligibles, including three women, two blacks, two Hispanics and one Asian.
No one who took the test had a perfect score, but three applicants scored a 95. By law, if all three pass their background checks and physicals, one of them must fill the first opening available. After the first appointment, the second person hired can be any one of the eligibles - the rest of whom all scored 90 - since civil service law allows up to two people at a given score to be passed over before someone with a lower scorer is considered.
"I have been proactive every step of the way," Meyer said. "It took a lot of work to kill the 2004 [civil service] list so we could give another test. But we did it. We sold the idea to the city and got the green light ... to start a recruitment unit. We go to the churches and to different colleges where we know there is diversification. And we started that in 2005, prior to giving the test."
He added that he was disappointed with Miller. "Not for nothing, I've called her a number of times, and she's never returned my phone calls," Meyer said. "I created a recruitment poster that was distributed throughout the North Park community in an effort to get the target population to come in and take the test. As we speak now, the wheels are turning on that 2005 test, but these things don't happen overnight."
Two minority officers were hired last year - Judith Arroyo, who is Hispanic, and Andy Ng, who is Asian, but the pressure to hire a black officer did not ease. When Arroyo was introduced at a North Park neighborhood association meeting last winter, a member of the audience shouted that she wouldn't be able to accomplish much in North Park because, he said, "she looks white."
City officials said there was no timeline for the city to hire new officers, but it could happen soon. Runnie Myles, who works in the civil service office and is Miller's grandson, said, "They don't have to hire anyone, I guess. But with the 25 percent [property tax] increase, they can't say it's money."
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