NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said it’s a challenge to find hirable blacks as cops because so many African-American men have been arrested

The NYPD has a hard time hiring black men to become police officers because too many have criminal records, the city’s top cop said in an interview.

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said it’s a challenge to find hirable blacks because so many African-American men have been arrested.

“We have a significant population gap among African-American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them,” Bratton said in an interview published Tuesday by The Guardian, a British newspaper with a New York bureau.

Bratton put at least part of the blame on the NYPD’s use of the controversial tactic stop-and-frisk, according to The Guardian. He acknowledged the “unfortunate consequences (of) stop, question and frisk,” a policy that hit communities of color hardest.

But once the article went online — with the jarring headline “NYPD chief Bratton says hiring black officers is difficult: ‘So many have spent time in jail,’” — Bratton went ballistic.

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