In the last decade, high-profile police killings — including George Floyd in 2020 — have shaken the nation and led to widespread protests and calls for reform, including hiring more nonwhite and female officers.
But there was little research to back that up. Now, a new study published last week in Science suggests that diversity in law enforcement can indeed lead to improvements in how police treat people of color, reports the Associated Press.
“It’s a system that very clearly needs reforming,” said University of Pennsylvania data scientist Dean Knox, a co-author of the study. “We just haven’t had good data on what reforms work.”
For the paper, Knox and his colleagues analyzed data on nearly 3 million Chicago Police Department patrol assignments. They found that compared to White officers, Black and Hispanic officers made far fewer stops and arrests — and used force less often — especially against Black civilians. They also found female officers used less force than their male counterparts.
“This is the best evidence to date” that officer demographics have an influence on policing, said Harvard sociologist Joscha Legewie, who was not involved in the study. “It’s an old question, and one that’s really hard to answer.”
Researchers spent three years fighting for detailed data from Chicago Police, and appealed some of their requests all the way up to the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.
“It’s a difficult, difficult thing to pull together these data sources,” said Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and a former Tennessee police officer who was not involved in the study. “This is the kind of research we really need.”
