NYC Council questions lack of diversity in NYPD’s top ranks

Too many white males are NYPD bosses compared with the rank-and-file’s diversity and the city’s makeup overall, several New York City Council members said Wednesday.

White males hold at least 70 percent of positions in the police force’s highest ranks, such as captain, deputy inspector, inspector, deputy chief, assistant chief and bureau chief, according to statistics distributed at the council’s Committee on Public Safety oversight hearing.

Councilman Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn) said he wants to know whether there’s “some blockage” preventing racial minorities and women from taking promotional tests and ascending to the NYPD’s top ranks.

“In the department, there’s only one constituency that outpaces, statistically, everybody else, and that’s white males, and we have to figure that out,” Williams said.

The NYPD’s first-deputy commissioner, Benjamin Tucker, told the committee that the department encourages all police officers to seek promotion and makes sure the tests are fair.

“You don’t get to the captain rank unless you take the promotional exams,” said Tucker, who is black. “At the end of the day you end up with whoever passes those exams being moving up through the ranks.”

Promotion into uniformed ranks beyond captain is at the discretion of the NYPD brass — but the pool consists of those who have already been promoted to captain.

Of the NYPD’s nearly 36,000 cops, more than half are white. The biggest minority groups are Hispanic, 27 percent; black, 15 percent; and Asian, 7 percent. Seventeen percent of the force is female, statistics show.

By Matthew Chayes

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Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.