Troubling reports out of Dayton regarding their inability to attract people of color to join the local police force.

The city of Dayton kept its police recruiting program dark for nearly a year and unfunded despite spending more than $550,000 settling a federal lawsuit calling for the city to hire a more diverse pool of police and fire candidates.

The city is being forced by the U.S. Department of Justice to diversify its safety departments as it scrambles to replace a mass exodus of officers set to retire beginning next year.

The city is also paying about $400,000 in relief to black applicants who took the civil service test in 2006, but did not pass or were not hired. It also paid a California-based testing firm $150,000 to revamp the test.

Cleveland area attorney Terry Gilbert breaks down the shooting by police officers of teenager Brandon McCloud in 2005.

Detective Phillip Habeeb waited outside the house for the right moment to make the early-morning entry, anxious to confront the 15-year-old boy he suspected of robbing a pizza deliveryman hours earlier. He and his partner, John Kraynik, were understandably upset, having arrested the same kid for a similar robbery six months earlier. They thought he’d learned his lesson during their last interrogation session, but apparently sterner and more aggressive measures were required. Armed with a search warrant, they waited for signs of movement in the house.

With time to burn, Habeeb called a radio dispatcher on his cell phone and chatted with her about the plan. The flirtatious dispatcher mused that if the detective was out of breath chasing the kid, “you know he’s running.” When the dispatcher suggested that he should “just shoot to kill,” Habeeb replied, “Absolutely.”

A few minutes later, Brandon McCloud lay dead in a pool of blood, shot 10 times in his own bedroom.

The PD issues a call for Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason to make good on his promise of reform to the criminal justice system after troubling racial disparities in sentencing were uncovered.

Minorities call it the “Just Us” system.

And it is. And it has been that way for far too long in Cuyahoga County.

In 2002, the Rev. Marvin McMickle — after completing a four-month term as a Cuyahoga County grand jury foreman — complained that the criminal justice system “had an apartheid feel to it.”

Last year, a two-part series in The Plain Dealer documented that white defendants were much more likely to have felony drug charges reduced to misdemeanors, or to receive treatment in lieu of conviction, than black defendants charged with the same crime.

The findings, based on a six-month review of hundreds of the lowest-level felony drug cases resolved between 2004 and 2007, cried out for immediate action to end the system of injustice.

Unfortunately, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason dragged his feet — his promised study only now materializing 14 months later with proposals for a team of Cleveland State University and University of Cincinnati researchers to study inequities at every stage of the process.

The Ohio BMV sent letters out to tens of thousands of Ohioans asking for proof that they can legally own a car. Several immigrant rights advocates contend that this may be a case of racial profiling.

Members of Central Ohio’s Hispanic community say they are the victim of racial profiling by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. The BMV sent out 47,457 letters last week to vehicle owners that do no have Social Security numbers, drivers license numbers or state identification numbers attached to their vehicle registrations.

Owners receiving the letter were told they have 60 days to produce identification or their registration will be canceled. The letter follows a change in policy that closed a legal loophole allowing undocumented immigrants without insurance or a drivers license to register a vehicle using the power of attorney process.

Stripped of their valid vehicle registration, undocumented workers could be pulled over, arrested and deported back to their home country if caught driving unregistered vehicles.

“This is nothing else but racial profiling,“ said a Columbus resident who received one of the letters this week and wished to remain anonymous. The man stated he is an American citizen and an Ohio resident for 26 years. “Nobody else got a letter, only the Spanish people.“