Achieving diversity in police ranks no easy task

Associated Press

When he took over as police chief last year in the St. Louis suburb of Maryland Heights, it didn’t take Bill Carson long to see he had a serious diversity problem. Of the department’s 79 sworn officers, just one was black and one Hispanic.

Carson quickly issued a plan that included advertising in the local black newspaper, outreach to groups such as the NAACP and participation in job fairs at area colleges with large minority student bodies.

Of 81 applicants in his first hiring round, only four were black or Hispanic — and the only one qualified chose to stay with the department where he was already working.

“I think the community feels better about their police department if the police department maybe reflects the makeup of the community,” says Carson, whose city is 10 percent black and 8 percent Hispanic. “But that’s easier said than done.”

The Aug. 9 shooting of unarmed Michael Brown Jr., 18, by a white officer in Ferguson, Mo., has focused attention on the lack of diversity in many police departments across the country. One often-cited statistic: Ferguson is about two-thirds black, but only three of its 53 officers are African-American.

But authorities say the reasons behind such numbers are many and often nuanced — and, as Carson learned, the remedies are not always quick or self-evident.

Experts say many departments limit their searches too close to home, often don’t recruit in the right places and set criteria that can disproportionately exclude groups they hope to attract. And across the U.S., police are not just struggling to attract blacks and Hispanics, but members of immigrant groups where distrust and fear of authority run deep.

“If you were taught from the time that you could speak, from the time that you could understand speech, that police are to be feared and that they’re part of an occupying force that is there to circumvent the democratic processes and to strip you of your rights, then it’s very difficult for that department to come into your neighborhood and tell you that they respect you and that you should join their team,” says Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president of The Center for Policing Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ferguson Chief Tom Jackson says a few black officers left in recent years for higher-paying jobs, and that the city has tried to recruit more. Ferguson officials didn’t respond to requests from The Associated Press to elaborate on those efforts.