Improving African American confidence in law enforcement: Recruit to optimize procedural justice, not racial quotas
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1461355720974698 |
| Author | Charles E MacLean |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Improving African American confidence
in law enforcement: Recruit to optimize
procedural justice, not racial quotas
Charles E MacLean
Metropolitan State University School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, USA
Abstract
Although a common maxim among many practitioners argues that police departments should recruit their way out of the
African American confidence race gap by hiring more minority officers, that maxim is unfounded and redirects our
recruitment efforts away from hiring to ensure procedural justice and police effectiveness—the two most powerful
determinants of African American confidence in the police. The author’s nationwide survey revealed that African
Americans living in cities with more racially representative law enforcement agencies were no more confident in local
law enforcement than those living in cities where African Americans were underrepresented. That same survey proved,
instead, that African American confidence is far higher where local police forces deliver procedural justice and effective
policing than where local police forces are merely racially representative. This article presents the survey findings and
explores the policy implications for law enforcement recruitment.
Keywords
African Americans, civilian confidence, police, diversity,proceduraljustice,representative bureaucracy, minority
recruitment
Submitted 27 May 2020, Revise received 21 Sep 2020, accepted 13 Oct 2020
Many American law enforcement professionals cling to a
purely apocryphal maxim that hiring more African Ameri-
can law enforcement officers will improve African Ameri-
can confidence in local law enforcement. That maxim
persists among many practiti oners and law enforcement
administrators to this day with virtually no empirical sup-
port. Nevertheless, that maxim did not survive the rigorous,
empirical study presented in this article. Exploratory factor
analysis, correlational analyses, and ordinal logistic regres-
sion were applied to data from the author’s online survey of
356 African American adults across the United States. The
participants’degrees of confidence in local law enforcement
were assessed based on their responses to more than 30
survey items that e xplored their att itudes toward local law
enforcement, fearof crime, neighborhood contexts, age,and
other characteristics. Additionally, each respondent’s local
law enforcementagency was evaluated using extant govern-
ment data regarding the degree to which African Americans
were proportionally represented among sworn officers com-
pared with the proportion of each community’s total popu-
lation that was African American. In every ordinal logistic
regression model,African American confidence in locallaw
enforcement was not significantly predicted or affected by
the degree to which AfricanAmericans were over- or under-
represented on the force. Instead, African American confi-
dence in local law enforcement was driven by African
American participants’ perceptions of both police effective-
ness and the quantum of procedural justice metedout by the
officers on the force. Thus, the study revealed that African
Americans seek procedural justice and effectiveness from
their local law enforcement agencies and the precise racial
Corresponding author:
Charles E. “Chuck” MacLean, Metropolitan State University School of Law
Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Brooklyn Park, MN 55445, USA.
Email: Chuck.MacLean@MetroState.edu
International Journalof
Police Science & Management
2021, Vol. 23(2) 102–118
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1461355720974698
journals.sagepub.com/home/psm
makeup of the swornofficers on the local force appears to be
largely irrelevant at the macro scale.
This finding ought not be used to discontinue efforts to
increase law enforcement officer diversity as supported by
the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st
Century Policing (2015). Ignoring diversity would erode
the many other benefits that can be realized by increasing
officer diversity. Increasing the proportion of African
American officers could reduce police shootings of African
Americans (Dunham and Petersen, 2017; Legewie and
Fagan, 2016; Nicholson-Crotty et al., 2017; Sekhon,
2017) and fear of crime (Hay, 1995). African American
officers are less likely to engage in “driving while Black”
and “stop-and-frisk while Black” incidents (Fagan et al.,
2016; Gilliard-Matthews et al., 2008). Increasing African
American diversity on the force can improve community
policing (Hall et al., 2016; Schuck, 2014), can reduce the
number of excessive force complaints and the number of
upheld excessive force complaints (Hong, 2016, 2017), and
can reduce the number of crimes (Hong, 2020). In addition
to those direct benefits related to improving African Amer-
ican officer representativeness, diversity can foster innova-
tion (Lambert, 2016; Rock and Grant, 2016), improve
performance (Roberson et al., 2017), broaden perspectives
and worldviews (Galinsky et al., 2015), better reflect amor-
phous preferences for a racially diverse police force (Weit-
zer, 2015), and “increase departmental expertise, range of
personnel resources, and community cooperation” (Hay,
1995: 9). The “law enforcement community recognizes the
need for increasing diversity within their ranks” (Wilson et
al., 2016: 245–246). Thus, this study does not justify with-
drawing from efforts to improve officer diversity.
African American confidence in law enforcement lags
far behind White confidence and that gap is grounded in the
country’s early history of slavery and long-standing racial
discrimination, White supremacy, and inequality in jobs,
criminal justice, politics, power, economics, housing, edu-
cation, and opportunities. But as this study illuminates, that
gap cannot be eliminated by simply hiring more African
American officers; rather, that gap must be mitigated by
infusing a culture of race-neutral procedural justice
1
with
law enforcement officers, regardless of color, treating all
equally and with dignity, respect, ju stice, equity, under-
standing, training, awareness, and patience.
Practitioners’ maxim: Hire more minority officers to
improve minority confidence in police
Practitionersoften repeat the maxim that increasingminority
representation will improve minority confidence and satis-
faction withlocal law enforcement. Former law enforcement
officer Nicole Caindeclared in PoliceOne, “Ideally, a police
agency’s demographics should mirror those of the
jurisdiction it serves” (2019: 4). International Association
of Chiefs of Police Diversi ty Committee member Cassi
Fields, writing in the Police Chief magazine, repeats the
maxim withoutevidence, claiming as a purportedtruism that
a more diverse cadre of officers will improve confidence in
the police (Fields, 2015). Bruce Kubu of the Police Execu-
tive Research Forum and his co-authors asserted that “A
police agency whoseofficers reflect the racial demographics
of the community theyserve ...conveys a sense of equity to
the public, especially to minority communities” (Fridell et
al., 2001: 68). Corrine Streit (2001), writing in the trade
magazine Law Enforcement Technology, arg ued without
evidence that increasing minority representat iveness can
improve minority confidence in local law enforcement. As
noted in Gupta and Yang (2016: ii), the President’s Task
Force on 21st Century Police glanced off the issue by argu-
ingincirclesthat,
increased diversity within law enforcement agencies – defined
not only in terms of race and gender, but also other character-
istics including religion, sexual orientation, gender identity,
language ability, background, and expe rience – serves as a
critically important tool to build trust with communities. This
finding is bolstered by decades of research conf irming that
when members of the public believe their law enforcement
organizations represent them, understand them, and respond
to them – and when communities perceive authorities as fair,
legitimate, and accountable – it deepens trust in law enforce-
ment, instills public confidence in government.
Gustafson (2013: 720) argued anecdotally that increas-
ing minority representation amonglaw enforcement officers
can “destroy stereotypes ...increase perceptions of legiti-
macy ...[and] close broad gaps in social distance ...
[because] the public tends to associate racially mixed poli-
cing with impartiality, fairness and trustworthiness”. Hen-
drix et al. (2018: 54–55) noted apocryphally that
Individuals who share specific traits, such as race or ethnicity,
may internalize a sense of belongingness to an ‘in-group’
through which trust and cooperation are easily fostered ....
minorities who feel unrepresented by their local police depart-
ment could internalize a sense of disconnect from the police or
come to believe that the department is not working on behalf of
the minority community’s best interests.
Finally, retired police chief Patrick Oliver, writing in the
Police Chief magazine, argued that
Diversity yields many benefits, both internally and
externally .... While African Americans report perceptions
of police bias, even leading to a pervasive fear of police
brutality, officer diversity can create confidence in a law
enforcement agency’s understanding of local issues and a
MacLean 103
To continue reading
Request your trial