A look at the current trend toward developing cultural diversity awareness training for police departments.
This paper examines how training in cultural diversity in law enforcement is not an idea that sprang to life in the current generation and how, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it was the so-called progressive policies in law enforcement and criminal justice that created the problems we see today. It looks at how these progressive policies, such as institutionalization, indeterminate sentencing, probation, and community corrections. All have been seen, in retrospect, to have had deleterious effects on the populations they were supposed to help, namely, immigrants and racial minorities, and preserving the locus of power and the status quo. It also discusses how researchers believe those reforms were more directed toward increasing effectiveness of the criminal justice system than in taking account of minority and cultural differences.
“One of the agencies seemingly committed to improving their report card concerning cultural diversity is the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division (CI). A statement by the agency said it realizes that “to be a leading law enforcement agency in the 21st century, we must fully embrace the diversity that exists among the citizens of America and strive to replicate that diversity among our own workforce”. The organization has created Diversity Council, made up of Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, male, and female CI employees. It is meant to provide a voice for employees to address diversity-related concerns, and improve the quality of their work life.”