State trooper wants more Black men to join the ranks

New York State Trooper Curtis Rich is living his dream. He sees the state police as an elite force and he’s glad to be a member of the team. However, he’s not finding a lot of Black men wanting to join him.

Rich, who is in Troop G, has been a New York state trooper since 2016. However, but he knows his life could have been very, very different. He became a dad at 15, which he says was a wake-up call for him.

He originally wanted to be a broadcast journalist, but then decided to work in a juvenile detention center where he saw that he could have gone down the same road as the young people he was working with.

He then went to work at the Department of Corrections and moved on to the New York State Police.

Learn about how he thinks the terrible history between Black people and law enforcement in the United States might be playing a role in the low numbers of Blacks joining the force by watching the video of Elaine Houston’s story.