Measuring the Impact of Police Representativeness on Communities

• In Event: Police and Minority Relations

Abstract

This study seeks to provide a unique perspective and empirical evidence on community conflict with police by integrating the theory of representative bureaucracy with criminal justice theories of policing legitimacy to inform the current crises and debate about police-citizen relations in the U.S., especially in minority communities. The study examines whether community complaints about police use of force are related to the representativeness of the police force, i.e. the extent to which the demographics of sworn police officers mirror their local constituency’ s demographic makeup. The study examines the relationship between use of force complaints lodged against a police force and the representativeness of the police vis-à-vis their community using OLS regression analysis and city fixed-effects models. The stratified sample of 100 large U.S. cities uses data from the U.S. Census Equal Employment Opportunity survey and the BJS Law Enforcement Management and Administration Statistics survey from several points-in-time. The analysis suggests that racial makeup and, to a lesser extent, local residency of police forces might matter in reducing community conflict with police, as represented by use of force complaints. However, the fixed effects model suggests that unobserved community-level characteristics and context matters more than police departments’ representativeness.

Authors

• Maren B. Trochmann, University of Colorado Denver

• Angela Gover, University of Colorado Denver