Police Agency Racial Composition and Racial Justice: A Multilevel Analysis of Arrest Disparities

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Nine: Race and Racism as Structured within and Culturally Propagated through the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

Racial disparities in arrests remain a persistent concern in American policing, raising questions about fairness, legitimacy, and structural inequality. While prior research has largely focused on individual officer characteristics, less attention has been devoted to the organizational context in which policing occurs. Drawing on representative bureaucracy theory, intergroup contact theory, and racial threat theory, this study examines whether the racial composition of municipal police agencies is associated with racial disparities in arrests. Using panel data from 215 municipal police agencies in Florida between 2016 and 2019 (727 agency-year observations), this study employs two-level multilevel models to distinguish within-agency changes over time from between-agency differences. Racial disparities are measured as Black-to-White and non-White-to-White arrest rate ratios across total, violent, and property crimes.

Results reveal contrasting patterns across levels of analysis. Within agencies, increases in the percentage of Black officers are associated with reductions in racial disparities in property crime arrests, and increases in the percentage of officers from other racial minority groups are associated with reductions in violent crime arrest disparities. These findings are consistent with representative bureaucracy and intergroup contact perspectives, suggesting that increasing diversity within agencies over time may promote more equitable enforcement. However, at the between-agency level, agencies with higher average percentages of Black officers exhibit greater Black-to-White arrest disparities, particularly for property crimes, a pattern consistent with racial threat theory and potentially reflective of broader structural conditions.

Overall, the findings indicate that the relationship between police racial composition and arrest disparities is complex and varies across temporal and structural dimensions. Organizational diversification alone may not uniformly translate into equitable outcomes without attention to contextual and institutional factors shaping enforcement practices.

Author

• Nan Li, University of Florida