This article originally appeared in the Beacon Hill Paper, October 20, 1998.

In 1968, just one percent of the police force was African-American or Hispanic. After a series of lawsuits sparked by accusations that minorities were being intentionally denied jobs, the city — as well as other municipalities across the state — entered into a consent decree. The decree required that the police department and fire departments consider potential employees from a list that was half white, half minority.

Twenty-five years later Boston's police department looks very different. Over 30 percent of the force is African-American or Hispanic. The department is well on its way towards the consent decree's goal of having a police force whose racial composition mirrors the city's.

Critics of the consent decree charge that it's hurt the police department. Rather than hiring on the basis of merit, they argue, people are being hired on the basis of their skin color. The result has been a less qualified, less skilled police force.

There's an Alice-In-Wonderland quality to the critics' argument. Back in the 1960s, no one credibly thought that police and fire jobs were handed out on the basis of merit. The jobs were a blatant form of patronage. It was who you knew or where you lived that drove hiring decisions.

Today's system — despite the fact that it is blatantly color conscious — seems to care much more about merit than did yesterday's. For example, although the police department has to consider candidates from that half-white, half-minority list, it can reject any of those for a wide variety of cause- or merit-related reasons. What it can't do, however, is reject (or hire) candidates simply because they support the right politician.

But arguments about test scores and hiring practices are somewhat sterile. The real issue should be: how good is the department itself?

Plainly much better than ever. As is well known, crime in Boston has dropped considerably. The police catch more criminals than before and there is a high level of calm that prevails in all of Boston's neighborhoods.

Part of the reason for that is improved management and a new focus on neighborhood policing. But part of the reason for today's public-safety success is that the police department is more diverse.

I remember well the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when the police were seen as the enemy, an occupying force akin to US soldiers in Bosnia. Those were the days when newspapers wrote about long, hot summers where communities could explode in a rage of violence.

Today's police officers are no longer seen as separate from the neighborhoods they police. They are part of those communities. They come from all of Boston's communities, not just some, and they look like those communities.

Indeed, lost in the current debate over affirmative action is that, as far as policing goes, having a diverse police force helps the police do their job better. Everyone understands, for example, that speaking Chinese helps a police officer do a better job in Chinatown. Being black, Hispanic or female also helps officers deal with the wide variety of people living in Boston.

It is odd that today's debate over affirmative action comes just as Boston is experiencing some of its greatest public safety successes. Reaching out to Boston's minority communities and making a genuine effort to hire African-American and Hispanics hasn't hurt the police department. It's made it better. And in doing so it's made all of our neighborhoods safer.