Violence and Police Diversity: A Call for Research

INTRODUCTIONProtests over police killings of unarmed black suspects drew national attention to places where majority-black communities are patrolled by predominantly-white police forces.1 A little-known place called Ferguson became a metaphor for concern over the use of force by unrepresentative police departments, as dramatic images of heavily-armored and primarily-white forces facing off against black community members beamed onto screens across the nation and the world.2 Is Ferguson's stark racial contrast an anomaly? The answer is no-as President Barack Obama told the nation, this was "not just a Ferguson problem."3 A racially unrepresentative police force is not just a Ferguson phenomenon either. Despite changes in the composition and training of police forces over the decades, hundreds of cities still have substantial gaps between the proportion of minorities on the police force and the proportion of minority community members.4Spurred by deaths and protests, police departments around the nation, including in Ferguson, are making efforts to hire more minority officers.5 But does police diversification actually help prevent violence in police encounters or address the heightened risk of death that minority community members face in police encounters?6 The question is of great practical and legal import. As a practical matter, communities and law enforcement agencies have a strong interest in preventing injuries and deaths in police encounters, rebuilding trust, and pursuing constitutionally defensible policies.As a legal matter, race-conscious hiring is subject to strict scrutiny and must be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling governmental interest.7 Conclusory statements of good intention do not suffice to justify such practices.8 While strict scrutiny is not always "strict in theory, but fatal in fact," the stated justification for race-conscious practices must be firmly established by the evidentiary record.9Formulated in the educational context to defend affirmative action programs, the diversity rationale justifies race-conscious preferences based on the benefits of having a diverse community, such as an enhanced educational experience.10 Much of the scholarly literature and court battles on the diversity rationale have focused on the educational context.11 Outside of the educational context, employment law scholars have explored whether the diversity rationale may also enter the workplace, thereby expanding the ability of employers regulated by Title VII's ban on employment discrimination to enact affirmative action policies.12 If police diversification reduces the risk of violence in police encounters, this would be a powerfully compelling interest. Yet the sufficiency of the evidence for the assumption that police diversification can help reduce the risk of resorting to violence remains an open question in need of address.13Moving beyond hope and assumptions, this Article addresses the question of whether police diversity actually protects against the risk of injury or death in law enforcement encounters. The Article is particularly timely as cities and their law enforcement agencies respond to calls for diversification of their forces in hopes that this might ameliorate the risk of violence.14 Drawing on restricted-access Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data and social psychological insights, this Article shows that there is a good basis to hypothesize that police diversification has violence prevention benefits; however, further study is needed.Smaller-scale studies have yielded mixed findings as to whether diversifying police forces with black officers, Hispanic officers, and female officers has any impact-or even an adverse impact-on the risk of a shooting by police.15 This article analyzes the limitations of existing empirical studies and argues that while there is insufficient direct evidence of a protective effect, it is too early to accept the null hypothesis of no beneficial effect. …