Lehigh County Controller Mark Pinsley announced a new policy Tuesday that changes hiring standards for local law enforcement. Under the first-of-its-kind guideline, candidates for jobs in law enforcement would be flagged if they have recent experience working with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.<\/p>\n
Candidates with such experience would be considered elevated risk and would fail both screening benchmarks.<\/p>\n
Pinsley has said the policy is data-driven, citing federal research showing that ICE\u2019s training requirements fall below national standards. Additionally, data indicates a higher rate of incidents with potentially unjustified use of force by ICE officers.<\/p>\n
The measurable risk of hiring former ICE officers as law enforcement would cross defined thresholds, explained Pinsley.<\/p>\n
The policy would not be a blanket ban. Lehigh County would simply apply the \u201csame objective standards to all candidates with prior law enforcement experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, it references research showing that officers often revert to patterns learned during prior training, meaning that retraining may not eliminate risk. Pinsley emphasized that the culture a potential officer was initially shaped in should be a part of the hiring decision.<\/p>\n
The policy has not formally been adopted by Lehigh County, but the Controller\u2019s Office is highly recommending that it be applied across all law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lehigh County Controller Mark Pinsley announced a new policy Tuesday that changes hiring standards for local law enforcement.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120],"class_list":["post-153807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}