Chicago Cops Propose to Discard Entrance Exam to Increase Minority Hires

City Hall sources say that the Chicago Police Department wants to dump its entrance exam because it would boost the hiring of minorities and save money on test preparation and lawsuits filed against the exam process. If the application-only process is implemented, Chicago would become the only major US city that would not have police entrance exams.

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Brad Woods, who had been in charge of the Personnel Division under Chicago Police Superintendents Phil Cline and Terry Hillard thinks the idea is the "wrong way to go."

"When you lower your quality, you will get poor police service and more complaints. ... Whenever you make it easier to be the police, you're doing the citizens and the Police Department a disservice."

Charlie Roberts, training division manager from 1995 to 1999, believes the idea would increase the failure rate among recruits.

"We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you'll get if you have no screening process?"

Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue maintains that a testing process is needed because a screening and application process would yield very limited information. Connie Buscemi, spokeswoman for the city's Department of Human Resources, said Mayor Daley's administration has been "reviewing all options right now on how to handle the application process" Donahue and the others understand the obvious need "to open up the process to as many people as possible," but they have some serious misgivings with a plan that scraps the police entrance exam to do so. As Donahue puts it, an idea like that is not just "ridiculous," it actually "sounds too stupid to be true." Currently, Chicago's police department suffers from a manpower shortage of at least 2,000 officers-a-day. Only 46 officers were hired this past year, and the Daley budget proposes to use federal stimulus funds to hire 86 more in 2010. A final decision on the application-only process may come before week's end.