No Trust in This Process

In today's editorial, The Tennessean opines in favor of racial discrimination in Metro Nashville Police Department promotion practices. The process that had been in place until recently had resulted in promotions for relatively few minority officers, so that system has been changed to allow the police chief to pass over officers with higher scores in order to promote some who made lower ones.

Arguing as only The Tennessean's editorial writer can, the piece somehow contends that a policy that promotes officers with worse scores "instills a level of trust that can be important for the force."

Having said that, it should be admitted that it is concerning that such a small number of minority candidates were promoted under the old system, and it would be in the best interests of the police department to try to figure out why that was the case. If the promotional process, which relied heavily on performance on written tests, was flawed, it should be altered or scrapped in favor of a better one. However, Metro has chosen the worst possible course. They have retained the possibly flawed process and chosen to simply allow the chief arbitrarily on the basis of race to pass over those who perform better.

That is a process that does not instill trust.