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Officer diversity is often advanced as a solution to racial disparities in police use of force, yet prior research shows comparable levels of force use disparity in predominantly black departments as in predominantly white departments. Prior work explains minority officer use of force against minority suspects using police culture arguments. Departing from this approach, we advance a perspective based on group contact theory that suggests that racial socialization within officers’ professional networks generates more willingness to use racially disparate force. We test this hypothesis using longitudinal network data from a predominantly black police department in a southeastern state. Consistent with expectations, we find that the number of white friendships within officers’ professional networks is associated with force use frequency against black suspects, net of officers’ race. This relationship is not conditioned by officers’ race and is not explained by officers’ friends’ force use against black suspects or overall force use. In contrast, we find no evidence that officers with a larger number of black friends use more force against white suspects. Further micro-macro mediation analyses reveal that a portion of these racial disparities can be traced to socialization within police departments, where within-department friendship selection through mutual affiliates creates local network clusters that account for a relatively large share of force use against black suspects. These results support the group contact perspective on racial disparity in police violence and carry implications for policy interventions designed to address police use of force.