As the U.S. Grows More Diverse, Most Police Departments Haven’t Kept Up
As the U.S. Grows More Diverse, Most Police Departments Haven’t Kept Up
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 of the data.
At least 135 became less white
relative to the population they serve.
At least 332 of the departments became more white
relative to the population they serve.
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, as the charts below show.
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 was a concerted effort among many police forces, especially in urban areas, to recruit and hire more officers of color 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 color across the country rose by 6 percentage points, to almost 28 percent, 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.
Share of local police officers and the U.S. population, by race and ethnicity
80%
White
police
White
population
60
40
Hispanic
population
20
Black
population
Hispanic
police
Black
police
2007
2013
2016
2007
2013
2016
2007
2013
2016
While many police departments became more diverse, Black officers often continued to be less represented. Diversity gains were instead fueled by growing numbers of Hispanic and Asian-American officers, a decline in the number of white officers, or a combination of both.
Change in share of officers, 2013 vs. 2016
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, D.C., referring to the half-dozen years since Michael Brown, 18, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
Before Ryan Tillman joined the Chino, Calif., force in 2014, he had had unpleasant encounters with the police, including a decade ago when an off-duty officer waved him down in an upscale neighborhood of a neighboring 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 say it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about Black officers from the federal data. On the one hand, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that the proportion of Black officers at local police departments across the country fell by half a percentage point, to 11.4 percent, between 2013 and 2016. But given the limitations of the data — all large departments were included but agencies with fewer than 100 officers were only sampled — researchers can’t say for sure how the numbers of Black officers have changed.
Notwithstanding the challenges in recruiting Black officers, Mr. Wexler and other experts say they are not surprised that some larger cities have taken greater steps than many smaller ones toward demographic parity in their police forces. Urban areas often have more resources, and more political will, to pursue greater diversity in the ranks, they said.
The new data also echo earlier findings of significant differences in the past dozen or so years in how many urban areas approach policing and criminal justice compared with smaller jurisdictions: The national trend toward lower incarceration rates, for example, has seemingly bypassed many smaller cities and rural areas, which continue to pack jails and prisons, even as their urban counterparts take ever-more-consequential steps to reduce incarceration rolls.
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 color. 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, N.J., 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 percent 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 percent of police chiefs were Black, the B.J.S. estimated.
A More Detailed Look at Police Departments
Here’s a breakdown of some key findings from the federal data.
The country’s largest police departments in 2016
| DEPARTMENT | White Black Hispanic Other | ||
|---|---|---|---|
New York City, N.Y. Pop. 8,443,713 36,050 police officers | Police 18 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Chicago, Ill. Pop. 2,718,555 11,965 police officers | Police 19 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Los Angeles, Calif. Pop. 3,959,657 9,809 police officers | Police 5 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Philadelphia, Pa. Pop. 1,575,522 6,031 police officers | Police 23 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Houston, Texas Pop. 2,295,982 5,203 police officers | Police 21 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Washington, D.C. Pop. 684,498 3,712 police officers | Police 1 pct. pts. less white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Dallas, Texas Pop. 1,318,806 3,408 police officers | Police 21 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Las Vegas, Nev. Pop. 626,637 3,387 police officers | Police 25 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Miami-Dade, Fla. Pop. 2,715,516 2,723 police officers | Police 7 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Baltimore, Md. Pop. 614,700 2,524 police officers | Police 22 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Departments that remained much whiter than the populations they served in 2016
| DEPARTMENT | White Black Hispanic Other | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Irving, Texas Pop. 238,637 341 police officers | Police 60 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Fontana, Calif. Pop. 208,943 182 police officers | Police 58 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Allentown, Pa. Pop. 120,410 218 police officers | Police 55 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Mesquite, Texas Pop. 144,250 217 police officers | Police 54 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Fairfield, Calif. Pop. 114,101 116 police officers | Police 54 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Sunnyvale, N.J. Pop. 100,809 186 police officers | Police 54 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Hartford, Conn. Pop. 123,628 396 police officers | Police 53 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Grand Prairie, Texas Pop. 191,104 270 police officers | Police 52 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Daly City, Calif. Pop. 106,638 104 police officers | Police 52 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Waukegan, Ill. Pop. 87,571 148 police officers | Police 52 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Departments that became much whiter than their communities, 2007 vs. 2016
| DEPARTMENT | White Black Hispanic Other | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Holyoke, Mass. Pop. 40,376 120 police officers | Police 50 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
North Richland Hills, Texas Pop. 69,800 110 police officers | Police 23 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Camden, N.J. Pop. 74,608 364 police officers | Police 48 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
West Valley City, Utah Pop. 135,985 190 police officers | Police 46 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Manchester, Conn. Pop. 57,955 108 police officers | Police 31 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Mesquite, Texas Pop. 144,250 217 police officers | Police 54 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Ann Arbor, Mich. Pop. 120,641 151 police officers | Police 18 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Utica, N.Y. Pop. 60,675 163 police officers | Police 35 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Youngstown, Ohio Pop. 64,734 150 police officers | Police 37 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Warren, Mich. Pop. 135,192 198 police officers | Police 30 pct. pts. more white than residents | MORE WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Departments that became closer to the racial makeup of their communities, 2007 vs. 2016
| DEPARTMENT | White Black Hispanic Other | ||
|---|---|---|---|
North Bergen, N.J. Pop. 61,970 119 police officers | Police 25 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Pine Bluff, Ark. Pop. 43,840 131 police officers | Police 18 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
West New York, N.J. Pop. 52,477 110 police officers | Police 8 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Chester, Pa. Pop. 33,977 97 police officers | Police 36 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Dearborn, Mich. Pop. 95,089 238 police officers | Police 14 pct. pts. less white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Union City, N.J. Pop. 68,362 161 police officers | Police 3 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
El Monte, Calif. Pop. 115,669 108 police officers | Police 30 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Fulton County, Ga. Pop. 1,021,902 138 police officers | Police 16 pct. pts. less white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
North Miami, Fla. Pop. 61,435 119 police officers | Police 8 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Pomona, Calif. Pop. 152,494 163 police officers | Police 36 pct. pts. more white than residents | LESS WHITE relative to the community since 2007 | |
Methodology
Police department demographics come from the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which is part of the Department of Justice. Figures from the most recent year available — 2016 — were released August 2020. Some departments had a number of officers whose race and ethnicity were unknown.
The Times worked with researchers at socialexplorer.com to match the demographics of local police departments with corresponding census data for the same jurisdictions. The analysis of police departments is for those with at least 100 sworn officers in the last three years a survey was collected: 2007, 2013 and 2016
“White” refers to people who are non-Hispanic white, “Black” refers to people who are non-Hispanic Black, and “other” refers to people who are not white, Black or Hispanic.
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