The following is a portion of a State Journal-Register editorial published on June 2, 2010.
"Mayor Tim Davlin once pledged to bring the percentage of minorities up to their proportion of the city’s population, which is roughly 15 percent. He made several efforts to try to boost the numbers, including appointing a University of Illinois Springfield administrator to spearhead those efforts in 2006.
'We need to get this up and running now,' Davlin said when he appointed UIS administrator Christopher Miller, who has since left the city. Today, less than 1 percent of the city’s firefighters are black and 4.6 percent of the city’s police officers are black, which is about the same as it’s been for years.
Although efforts at minority recruitment by Miller yielded significant improvement in the number of minorities taking the test, too many of them were stuck in the lower bands to make a big difference in the actual number of minorities in the police department."
Download a PDF of the editorial
