DON’T GIVE UP ON DIVERSIFYING THE POLICE
The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols, a young Black man, by five Black police officers in Memphis has reignited debates over whether diversity in police agencies can help address racial disparities in police brutality. For some right-wing commentators, the race of the offending officers is evidence that racism played no role in the event. To some progressive activists, politicians and scholars, the implication is that even diversifying police forces makes a negligible difference in a system that is harsher toward Black civilians, and the only answer is to abolish the police. Both arguments imply that diversifying the police is not an effective way to help curb these abuses.
The reality, as with most social phenomena, is much more complicated. Recent advances in the study of race and policing indicate that while diversity in law enforcement is far from a panacea, it can substantially help reduce use of force by police on average — and abandoning diversity-focused reforms would be shortsighted.
Diversifying law enforcement is one of the oldest proposed police reforms, in part because for much of U.S. history nearly all police officers in the United States were white and male, even in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
Police agencies in the United States have, to varying degrees, diversified substantially in terms of race, ethnicity and gender. Social scientists across several disciplines, myself included, have sought to quantify what role, if any, officer identity can play in day-to-day interactions between police and civilians.
For many years, the data was limited, and studies produced mixed results. But several recent studies have made great strides in understanding diversity in law enforcement, and their results show marked differences in the way Black, Hispanic and female officers treat civilians relative to their white and male counterparts, even when these groups are deployed to highly similar places, times and scenarios.
In 2021, I published a study in Science with co-authors Bocar Ba, Dean Knox and Roman Rivera that examined years of detailed deployment records of Chicago Police Department officers alongside their stops, arrests and uses of force, allowing for comparisons of officers facing common circumstances. What we found was striking: “Relative to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians. These effects are largest in majority-Black areas of Chicago and stem from reduced focus on enforcing low-level offenses, with greatest impact on Black civilians.”
Still, many leading progressive voices in debates over abusive policing are advocating for more extreme policy responses, up to and including the outright abolition of police.
Proposals to defund and eliminate the police have been shown to be political nonstarters, with even lowlevel reforms meeting stiff opposition. These proposals are broadly unpopular even in communities of color.
We are left with two broad options: pursue imperfect but politically feasible reforms that show promise, or leave suffering communities to languish in the status quo. Diversification is one of many possible reforms, and there might be others with the potential to deliver even larger benefits, including reducing the role of police in responding to mental health crises, and enhancing penalties for police misconduct.
The unconscionable actions of those Memphis police officers show that diversification is, on its own, a woefully insufficient policy response. But to combat a scourge as persistent as abusive policing, we cannot afford to ignore even partial remedies.
Jonathan Mummolo is an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University whose research focuses on police behavior in the United States, the impact of police reforms and statistical methods for quantifying racial bias in policing.