There have been 29 complaints filed since March alleging bias and a hostile work environment for minority Denver police officers and others perceived as “different.” Hazing and discrimination have no place in city employment, and we’re glad to see that city hall will be reviewing the allegations to determine whether there is a problem.
“The city generally and the safety department particularly are committed to equal employment,” says the mayor’s chief of staff, Cole Finegan. “We want to make sure there is no discrimination. We take it very seriously.” A top lawyer has been assigned to look into the matter, an ongoing concern for city police in recent years.
In Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, current, former and would-be police officers accused the police of a pattern of discrimination dating to the early 1970s, according to the Denver Police Latino Organization.
“One of our missions is to try to get the department to more closely mirror the demographics of the community,” said Sgt. Leonard Mares, vice president of the group.
Finegan notes that the percentage of Latino officers now exceeds requirements of a 1975 federal consent decree on minority hiring. Even so, at 20 percent Latino, the force trails the city’s shifting demographics: More than 35 percent of the city population is Hispanic. (The department is 9.4 percent African-American, 1.7 percent Asian-American and 0.8 percent Native American.)
Not all the complaints were by Latinos – some were from African-American, white, gay and disabled officers. A Latina officer says she reported a sexual assault by a fellow cop who was allowed to retire unscathed; another officer said he was harassed after revealing he was gay, Mares said. When Detective Rufino Trujillo, the Latino group’s president, complained not that enough Latinos were picked for task force assignments, somebody put a flashlight taped up to look like a bomb on his desk.
Other accusations said that unproven charges or minor incidents are unfairly used to block the applications of Latino police candidates. “Some neighborhoods are tougher than others, and they’re using that to disqualify them,” Mares said.
Finegan says the city has met the mandate of the so-called Hogue Decree that the percentage of minority officers match the percentage of eligible minority high-school graduates, which is 14.25 percent for Latinos. (But, we note, the Denver schools graduation rate for Hispanics is less than 50 percent.)
Clearly, the decree’s percentages are outdated. And bias charges must be investigated and remedies applied, if appropriate.
