Their Civic Duty
Members of the NYPD Desi Society march.
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Desi Cops Grow In Numbers
When Jag Jaskaran came to the United States from Guyana in 1980 as an 8-year-old, he knew he wanted to be a police officer.
“I saw it as a means to help people,” Jaskaran said. “What appealed to me was the idea of what a police officer does.”
Jaskaran said while many South Asians flock to medical, legal, and business industries, they are scarce in law enforcement, a reality Jaskaran began to change in 1994 when he graduated from the police academy as one of about 10 South Asian cadets.
Over the next decade, Jaskaran jumped up the ladder of the New York Police Department and today serves as the commanding officer of a special operations unit in Manhattan and as a captain, is the highest ranking South Asian in the department.
“I’ve always worked hard,” said Jaskaran, who lives in Jamaica. “I’ve made it my mission to excel in every area or assignment. It’s an obligation to make way for other immigrants coming onto the job. If I succeed, it makes it easier for the next person.”
Ensuring South Asians are well represented in law enforcement led to the creation of the Desi Society in 2004, a group greatly needed, Jaskaran said, because South Asians—from countries like India, Trinidad and Guyana—were not delineated from Chinese of Korean officers in the police department.
“There was no voice in police department to represent South Asians,” he said.
In two years the organization has grown from 35 members to 140, just by word of mouth, and Jaskaran hopes to reach all of the South Asian officers—about 1,000 uniformed officers and civilian members, like traffic agents and school safety guards.
Jaskaran said he wants the organization to improve community and police department relations, encourage police department recruitment in South Asian communities and show South Asians that law enforcement is an important and honorable profession.
But the small South Asian presence in the police department has worked to Jaskaran’s advantage when he worked as a plain-clothes officer combating street crime.
“I wasn’t seen as a bad guy (to the criminals) because they didn’t [see] South Asians as cops. It enabled me to get closer in proximity. It helped me in that sense.”
Jaskaran said while people’s stereotypes of cops sometimes work in his favor, Sept. 11 suddenly made him aware of his ethnicity. Jaskaran was one of the first responders to the World Trade Center and he saw “the best in people” that day. But that soon changed when he was off duty.
“I was surprised a day or two after the event—the statements I received from people in general,” he said. “I’m seen as an outsider. 9-11 did more to separate South Asians from mainstream society,” which is why the Desi Society is so important.
“We are trying to show New York and the world, we’re part of New York,” he said. “We’re part of America. We’re Americans.”
This week the NYPD graduated 1,359 new police officers, the majority of whom were minorities.
