If there is one thing we learned from the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, it’s that police officers should be competent, qualified, and fully prepared for the job.
Or maybe it was that it is racist to expect the police to know how to do math.
Maryland State Police have reached a settlement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office over a lawsuit that alleged that the department was discriminating against black and female applicants for state trooper positions. The department must throw out its written and physical fitness tests for being “discriminatory” and must hire up to 25 of the applicants who were previously deemed not to be qualified based on either of those tests.
It was determined that the Maryland state trooper written exam was discriminatory because black applicants did not pass it at the same rate as white applicants. As we all know, equity dictates that any statistical discrepancy must be the result of racism and that all results must be equal, so expecting Maryland State Troopers to have basic math, grammar, and reading comprehension skills is out of bounds.
Among the questions on the study guide for the test are such difficult and discriminatory questions such as how long of a time period is 11 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., what is $2,040 minus $100, and what is the plural form of “knife.” Most of the questions are multiple-choice, just in case those seem too difficult for you to come up with the answers for on your own.
Remember those 2020 demands that police officers be required to get college degrees? How quaint those demands seem now.
The physical fitness test was also determined to be sexist because female applicants failed it at a higher rate than male applicants. Again, according to equity, this is not because men and women are biologically different and men are physically faster and stronger, but because the test is sexist. Therefore, Maryland state troopers are no longer expected to do 18 push-ups with no time limit, 27 sit-ups with no time limit, or run 1 1/2 miles in 15 minutes and 20 seconds, a pace of under 3 yards per second, for you football mathematicians.
Therefore, the most qualified police officers are ones who cannot do basic math, spell words correctly, or have any basic physical ability. If you expect otherwise, you must hate black people and women. That is the contention of the diversity, equity, and inclusion ideologues — and, of course, the federal government under President Joe Biden. Anything to be able to call police departments bigots.
Therefore, thanks to the Democratic Party and DEI, Maryland residents will now have up to 25 state troopers who can’t do push-ups or elementary subtraction, with more to come now that the state is being forced to eliminate those standards. Such is the evolution from “police officers must be overqualified and incredibly competent” to “expecting police to know that ‘Wedesday’ is misspelled is racist.”
Someone should probably ask the Black Lives Matter protesters of 2020 how they feel about “antiracism” being used to justify less qualified police officers. At the very least, we deserve to enjoy those answers.