NYT: Many Police Forces Have High Percentages of White Officers Compared to Communities They Serve

By Alfred Branch and Lanning Taliaferro

An eye-opening interactive report in The New York Times shows the disparity between the races of police officers in a cross section of municipalities and residents in the communities they serve.

“In hundreds of police departments across the country, the percentage of whites on the force is more than 30 percentage points higher than in the communities they serve, according to an analysis of a government survey of police departments,” Times reporters Jeremy Ashkenas and Haeyoun Park found. They based their analysis on a 2007 survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of almost all police departments with 100 or more sworn officers and a representative sample of smaller departments.

In the New York City metropolitan area, the Times reported, three suburban New Jersey departments topped the disparity list: the percentage of whites on the force in Plainsboro, Edison and North Bergen was more than 56 percentage points higher than in the communities they serve.

Local communities highlighted in the report include Clarkstown in Rockland County and Bedford, Harrison, New Rochelle and White Plains in Westchestcher County. All had a lower than 30 percentage point disparity.

For Clarkstown, the Times reported a percentage of whites on the force 27 percentage points higher than the percentage of whites in the community.

In New Rochelle, the disparity was 29 percentage points. In White Plains, the percentage of white officers was 23 percentage points higher.

The disparity for Harrison was 19 percentage points. In Bedford, the percentage of whites on the force was 12 percentage points higher than the percentage of whites in the community.

The report comes on the heels of the racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. More diversity within a police force can increase a department’s “credibility” within its town, according to the Times.

“Even if police officers of whatever race enforce the law in relatively the same way, there is a huge image problem with a department that is so out of sync with the racial composition of the local population,” Ronald Weitzer, a sociologist at George Washington University, told the Times.

Click here to read the full report on The New York Times website.