Hundreds of US police departments considerably more white than their communities, data shows

Widening racial gap means residents more often meet officers who don’t look like them

White Cleveland police officers stop a black man selling t-shirts in Wade Park, Ohio, on 29 September (Getty)

Amid a national outcry over the lack of diversity in institutions across the United States, new federal data show that rank-and-file officers in hundreds of police departments are considerably more white than the communities they serve.

Of 467 local police departments with at least 100 officers that reported data for both 2007 and 2016, more than two-thirds became whiter relative to their communities between those years, according to a New York Times analysis.

Some departments — including many of the largest, like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Dallas — narrowed the gap between the share of white police officers and white residents when comparing 2016 with 2007. But most police forces did not keep pace with the changing demographics of their cities.

The widening racial gap means that at a time when the nation’s population is growing more diverse, residents more often meet officers who don’t look like them.

There were efforts among many police forces, especially in urban areas, to recruit and hire more officers of colour from 2007 to 2016 - the most recent year for which federal data is available. And there have been decades-long gains in the number of officers who are not white.

Indeed, from 1997 to 2016, estimates of the proportion of officers of colour across the country rose by 6 percentage points, to almost 28 per cent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, with the biggest police forces growing more diverse.

But few cities reached the point where the demographics of their police departments better reflected their communities. Nationwide, the share of white officers exceeds the share of the white population and the gap has grown larger over time. Black and Hispanic groups remain underrepresented in the police force.

While many police departments became more diverse, black officers often continued to be less represented. Diversity gains were instead fuelled by growing numbers of Hispanic and Asian American officers, a decline in the number of white officers, or a combination of both.

Many of the largest police departments struggled to retain black officers, with the share of black officers who left policing jobs in 2016 outpacing the share of new hires who were black, the Times analysis of the federal data shows.

Policing experts have attributed at least some of that gap to national outrage and fallout over the deaths of black men at the hands of the police in recent years. Those deaths, many of which happened in police custody and were filmed by witnesses, have made retaining and recruiting black officers more difficult, they said.

“It has been really daunting in the post-Ferguson era to maintain and increase the diversity of departments,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit in Washington, DC, referring to the half-dozen years since Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Before Ryan Tillman joined the Chino, California, force in 2014, he had had unpleasant encounters with police, including a decade ago when an off-duty officer waved him down in an upscale neighbourhood of a neighbouring city. The officer told Mr Tillman, who is black, that he didn’t belong there, and that he would call in on-duty officers if he didn’t leave.

Still, Mr Tillman wanted to become a police officer and he is now a corporal who supervises patrol officers. He said that while there are white officers who don’t understand the experience of African Americans, there are also black people “who won’t be able to understand because they’ve never walked in the shoes of officers”.

That inability to understand each other’s perspective affects recruitment, especially in the current environment. “There are a lot of minorities who just don’t like police,” Mr Tillman said. “And if you do have one who wants to be a police officer, they’re afraid to come out and tell people that they want to do that.”

As America becomes more diverse and the rank and file of police departments doesn’t fully reflect the communities they serve, “policing is no longer a profession that people view as something they want to get into,” said Rashawn Ray, a policing expert at the Brookings Institution and a professor at the University of Maryland.

“When you have a police department that’s not diverse or you have a police department that doesn’t live in local communities — and by local communities I mean often black, Latino or low-income communities — what happens is that black and Latino youth, low-income youth, they never see police officers unless they’re doing something to them or to people who they love and care about,” Mr Ray said. “Why would you want to go into a profession where every time you see somebody, they’re harassing somebody or arresting someone?”

Researchers have found that greater diversity in police departments and local government boosts trust in those institutions in nonwhite neighborhoods. Some have also found that white officers are more likely than Black officers to use guns or other force in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are not white. Yet experts also caution that having more people of color as law enforcement officers does not always mean more equitable policing.

For example, according to the data, Chicago’s 12,000-member police department grew more diverse in 2016 compared with 2007, relative to the city it serves. But the shift in demographics did not necessarily translate to improved relationships with black and Hispanic communities and other communities of colour. In January 2017, the Department of Justice released a scathing report concluding that the use of excessive force among Chicago police officers was rampant, and aimed primarily at black and Hispanic residents.

In contrast, the police department in Camden County, New Jersey, is vastly whiter than the community it patrols. In 2016, slightly more than half its force of 364 officers was white, even though it patrols an area that is only 6 per cent white.

Yet Camden, whose chief is also white, has gained a reputation as one of the most progressive departments in the country, following a decision seven years ago to disband and rebuild the city’s police department. The new force patrols inside the city of Camden, where homicides and excessive-force complaints against officers have fallen significantly in recent years.

Mr Ray, of the Brookings Institution, said his research shows that rank-and-file officers, regardless of race, were similarly likely to use force against black people. But he said there was evidence that excessive-force complaints decline when police departments have chiefs who are not white, or when a lot of nonwhite officers are in high-ranking positions.

“There is some other research that shows that the race of the police chief, or upper management, does matter in terms of decreasing police killings,” Mr Ray said. “I interpret that to mean that if you have a more diverse upper management in a police force, there are more accountability metrics in place that can lead to officers’ being held accountable.”

The demographics of those ranks differ significantly by community size. In cities with more than a quarter-million people, almost one-fifth of the police chiefs were black. However, the vast majority of local police departments serve communities with fewer than 100,000 people. In those places, just 4 per cent of police chiefs were black, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated.

New York Times