Perceptions of the Race Gap in America’s Police Departments

• In Event: Varieties of Policing Research

Abstract

The President’s Commission in 1967 recommended that police departments that serve racially diverse cities should recruit a greater number of minority officers to build trust between the community and law enforcement officials. But recent analyses have shown that 50 years later many American police departments still do not reflect the racial makeup of their communities, and there is mixed scholarly evidence that greater minority representation is associated with higher levels of trust in the police. Furthermore, it is unclear from prior research whether citizens can accurately estimate the racial composition of the police. To address this gap in the literature and policy debate, we conduct a national sample survey of U.S. adults to measure beliefs about local police and law enforcement in general, as well as perceptions about the racial makeup of police departments, and use ZIP codes to connect these original data to the 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics data on the composition of police departments. This project addresses a gap in the literature on police-community relations by measuring, for the first time, whether citizens’ perceptions of the police race gap are 1) accurate, and 2) correlated with feelings of trust in the police.

Author

• Cameron G DeHart, Stanford University