Justice Dept. Says Minorities Now Make Up More than a Quarter of Local Police Officers
2015/5/14-Local police departments have grown considerably over the past few decades, and over that time period, these forces have been employing far more officers who are women or members of a racial or ethnic minority.
These changes were outlined in a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which provides an interesting snapshot of the thousands of local law enforcement agencies that police this country — something that seems very relevant amid ongoing debates about how the police treat people of color.
Here are six things we learned from the new report, released publicly Thursday:
1. More than a quarter of local officers are not white
The number of local police officers who were members of an ethnic or racial minority has increased in recent years and absolutely skyrocketed over the last quarter century.
In 2013, 27 percent of full-time local police officers were minorities, the report states. That is up significantly from the 14.6 percent of officers who were minorities in 1987.
The diversity of local police forces has come under increasing scrutiny recently, something highlighted by that blistering Justice Department reportabout the way white police in Ferguson, Mo., treated black residents there. This report noted that the lack of police diversity in Ferguson impacted relationships between the officers and the community.
FBI Director James B. Comey also spoke about the subject in February, before the Ferguson report came out, and he spoke about how racial biases exist among police officers and lamented the “disconnect” between officers and minorities.
The increase in non-white police officers in local departments does not resolve this tension, of course, but it certainly addresses something that the Justice Department has recommended.
2. The bigger the population, the more diverse the police
This part probably won’t come as a shock, as larger population centers — your big-city metropolitan areas — have seen an increase in residents who are not white, with minorities in several cities becoming majorities since 2000. Still, even as police diversity increased in places regardless of population size, departments in the bigger places were more diverse than the ones in smaller areas.
The percentage of white officers nationwide was about 72.8 percent in 2013; the percentage of white officers was lower in places with a quarter of a million residents or more, but higher for most smaller populations.
[As U.S. pushes police to diversify, the FBI is still overwhelmingly white and male]
3. One in eight local police officers are women
Oh, and that Justice Department report about Ferguson also noted — in a footnote tucked toward the end of the report — that investigators also found evidence that the largely-male department tolerated sexual harassment. Federal officials said they received complaints about the lack of gender diversity in the city, and they recommended changing that.
About 1 in 8 local police officers were women in 2013, roughly the same number as seen in 2007 but an increase from 1987. Much like minority officers, police departments in bigger jurisdictions were far more likely to have more female police officers. About 3 percent of local police chiefs were female nationwide. (Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that while women make up about 12 percent of local police forces, they make up about 47 percent of the civilian labor force in this country.)
4. These departments have really, really grown…
The new report says that the more than 12,300 local police departments in the country employed about 477,000 sworn officers, an increase of about a third over the number in 1987. Nearly 7 in 10 of these officers were assigned to patrols. There are also more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices employing another 188,00 full-time personnel, according to the report. (A third of the country’s police departments use unpaid reserve or auxillary police, too.)
5. …but about half of these departments are really, really small
About half of these local police departments employ fewer than 10 police officers. The number of officers is considerably larger in bigger places: Areas with 100,000 residents or more employed more than half of all local police officers nationwide.
6. The NYPD has a lot of police officers
The New York Police Department was the largest local force in the country in 2013, with about 34,400 officers. In other words, there are as many NYPD officers as there are residents in Beverly Hills, Calif.. There were another 42 police departments with more than 1,000 full-time officers; the 999 officers in Newark just missed that cutoff, it seems.
Source: Washington Post
