Noble Intentions.

Noble intentions.

That is what Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown and Police Commissioner Daniel Derrenda have with their Police Scholarship program. They call it “BPD 21C” for the “Buffalo Police Department 21 Century.”

A little background information: Buffalo has 700 police officers. 30% of them are “minorities” and 24% of the force is female. (There is overlap with the female and minority statistics.)

The racial make-up of Buffalo, however, is much more diverse – 46.2% white, 36.9% African-American, 9.7% Hispanic, and 3.8% Asian. Buffalo is a minority-majority city. The face of the American future.

The goal of these scholarships is to increase the amount of minorities in the Buffalo Police Department (BPD) – African Americans, Asians, Latinos, and women.

The scholarships – approximately $6800 to 50 successful applicants – are going to help them with preemployment training towards passing the city's civil service exam and potentially being hired for the BPD

That's a nice first step.

It doesn't go far enough.

It doesn't cover firearms training or the federally mandated Homeland Security training.

It's like receiving a scholarship for your freshman and sophomore years in college and being let go for the junior and senior years. The two most important ones.

Without those two courses, can the recruits be kept on the force? And if they are – will they be anything other than “desk jockeys” or “paper pushers?”

The scholarships need to get the candidates through all the training. I have a number of students every year that get a “free ride” - that's full tuition (including books, room and board) to a wide variety of colleges across the United States.

Buffalo, and Albany, can do better than this.

Where can the money come from? Easy. Start looking at all those tax breaks given to private corporations that never delivered the jobs they promised. (Buffalo School Board Member Carl PaladiNO received $1.4 million and created only 1 job with it. Thank you Governor “Status” Cuomo for that information.) If the corporations didn't create and keep the promised jobs, the tax breaks just became interest bearing loans. (Win for the taxpayer.) That money can then be used to fully fund full tuition for all qualified candidates and virtually guarantee that the BPD will soon reflect the racial diversity that the people of Buffalo  needs it to have

And that will be a step in the right direction towards reducing racial tensions in the city.

Otherwise, we know what road is paved with noble intentions.

And nobody really wants to go there.