Not just Baltimore: Where police are whiter than those they serve

The frightening scenes of urban unrest in Baltimore, and in Ferguson, Missouri before that, reflect a long-smoldering distrust of police in African-American communities nationwide.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission, appointed following riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark and Detroit, concluded that for some blacks “police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression.” Its report went on to say that the “abrasive relationship between police and the minority communities has been a major-and explosive-source of grievance, tension and disorder.”

For many those words still ring depressingly true today. The commission recommended that big cities recruit more African-Americans for their police departments and review policies to assure fair promotion opportunities for black officers. Since then, a lot of departments, Baltimore’s among them, have made substantive strides in increasing the diversity of their police forces. But Census Bureau statistics also indicate that police in many of America’s largest cities still don’t reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.

To estimate the racial makeup of police and residents in 50 of the most populous cities in the US, the Center used data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey conducted from 2006-2010, a similar method to a project by the Washington Post. For police, numbers reflect a Bureau estimate of people who work as a police patrol officer, criminal investigator, detective or first-line supervisor in the cities listed. The Bureau based this estimate on survey responses from individuals who said they worked in those jobs. The numbers may include federal, county and other law enforcement officers working in those cities in addition to officers working in metropolitan police departments.

Noun Project icons by Lynn Christensen, Alberto Guerra Quintanilla.

This story is cross-posted by our partners at The Center for Public Integrity