I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, May 28th.

Most people believe that one path to more justice in policing is to have a more diverse police force. But getting a job on one of Long

Island's highly paid police forces has been more than three times tougher for black would-be

officers than for white applicants and twice as tough for Hispanic job seekers in recruitment by

the Nassau and Suffolk County departments.

That's according to a new Newsday investigation called Barriers to Badges.

With me now is Jim Bamback investigative reporter for Newsday and author of the report.

Hi, Jim. Welcome to WNYC.

Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Why did you decide to look into the racial makeup of the Long Island Police Departments? What were you looking for? So basically it started last June. We're almost at the year mark. Obviously, it was in the wake of the George Floyd murder. You know, it started with a simple question. It was, you know, how diverse are the Nassau and Suffolk police

departments? And then the answer came back very quickly that it's not very diverse, that both of them

were about 85, 86 percent white. So then it became, why is it not diverse? What's happening? And,

you know, when we look back, you know, they've been under their federal consent decrees for some 40 years to basically diversify their police forces. And the story's been

done over those 40 years many times where commissioners and county executives have stressed

the importance of getting it done. But it just hadn't happened. And they mentioned, you know, where they're looking to recruit,

it's a big, recruitment's a big thing. But when we look through it, you say, well, you know,

they're getting a diverse applicant pool. Why are they, why is it not turning into a diverse,

you know, police force at the end of it? Why isn't, why are the recruiting not, recruits not

the verse? So that basically was the impetus to say, let's look into this process of how

do you become a police officer. So let's talk about the tests. And by way of background, I think

these are stats from your article. Close to 20,000 people apply to be on these police forces every

year and only a couple of hundred are accepted. So the acceptance rates for anybody is low,

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