However, the problem of over-reliance on law enforcement goes beyond the questionable impact on crime rates. When officers are deployed in response to various concerns, more and more civilians find themselves unnecessarily entangled in the justice system. In 2016, Americans were arrested 2.18 million times for alcohol abuse, alcohol-related offenses, and drug charges6 – more than four times the total number of arrests for all serious violent crimes combined.7 The overuse of law enforcement, in particular, has had profound consequences for Black communities that have long faced excessive and aggressive law enforcement practices.8 Conflict with the criminal justice system, no matter how minor, can have lasting consequences. Even arrests that do not lead to a conviction come with a criminal record – and with it permanent barriers to education, employment, housing and other basic elements of a healthy lifestyle. Too often, interactions with police can be deadly. Police violence is one of the leading causes of death among Black men, who are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than White men.9 In their lifetime, 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys will be killed by a police officer.10 In the following section, this report examines the barriers faced by law enforcement in three broad categories: (i) recruitment, (ii) hiring and (iii) retention. Many individuals and organizations, including law enforcement officials, academics, and civil rights practitioners, have studied and documented policies and practices that impede diversity in the country`s law enforcement agencies. This section attempts to build on this work and complement it with additional information, detail and experience from the various missions undertaken under the Diversity in Law Enforcement Initiative. Policing has evolved for centuries and will continue to do so for centuries. However, just like the business world, the world of policing has moved to a world that mixes brick and mortar with bits and bytes. Cameras and phones collect data, communities communicate their expectations via social media, and criminals use new technologies every day.
These technological changes and community expectations are prompting law enforcement agencies to adopt new policing strategies that break old trade-offs between law enforcement and community engagement to do both. At the same time, departments need to provide agents with new tools that use the human-machine team to advance the use of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to manage large amounts of data, triage incoming emergency calls, and even determine where and when officers should be deployed. To explore promising practices that improve diversity in law enforcement, the EPC has also reached out to several law enforcement agencies that are relatively successful in becoming more diverse. The CED began by identifying small (i.e., 75 or fewer sworn officers), medium (i.e., 76 to 125 sworn officers) and large (i.e., 126 or more sworn officers) using the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) dataset. LEMAS data showed demographic characteristics of National Division staff, including the number of full-time sworn officers who were women, African American, Latino, Asian-American and full-time White. These data were combined with 2010 U.S. Census data for the city or county of a particular county to determine the degree of parity between the department`s diversity and the community. This method has provided a number of six divisions representing states in the Western, Eastern, North, and Southern regions of the United States that are small, medium, and large, and have successfully employed sworn personnel that better reflect the demographics of the communities they serve by gender and race. The selected departments did not always accurately reflect the demographics of each gender and racial category, but the diversity of their officer ranks approached parity with at least one or more under-represented groups in their jurisdiction.
The promising practices described in Section VII of this report come from the following six departments: To address some of the misperceptions, confusion and lack of awareness of hiring processes, law enforcement agencies have streamlined their hiring processes and made these processes more transparent. The authorities have found that these efforts, which benefit all applicants, are particularly useful for candidates from underrepresented populations who, as noted above, are more familiar with the lengthy and complex processes that have traditionally defined the law enforcement hiring process. The tragic events of recent years – including the shootings and attacks on law enforcement officers, as well as the demonstrations and protests that led to these incidents – have drawn public attention and brought a variety of peripheral policing issues to the center of our public dialogue, including a renewed focus on the growing diversity of the country`s law enforcement agencies. In December 2014, President Obama announced the creation of a Task Force on 21st Century Policing (Task Force). The working group brought together a wide range of stakeholders – including law enforcement, lawyers, academics, policy makers and community members – to explore strategies to strengthen community-police relationships, reduce crime and improve public safety. In one of its key recommendations to “build trust and legitimacy” in community-police relations, the Task Force emphasized the need to ensure that law enforcement agencies better reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. For too long, cities` public safety programs have been set by their law enforcement agencies, to the detriment of the community and police. As the movement to separate police services grows, local leaders have the opportunity to meaningfully advocate for community-based solutions for public safety. Many policymakers are already considering strategies that do not rely on the justice system to address behavioral health issues, homelessness, and substance abuse. Efforts to deter police officers from engaging in activities for which they are not trained or equipped are a promising first step.
However, the discussion of community-based approaches to public safety should not stop at so-called low-level issues: community-based interventions are also an effective tool for violence prevention, a function generally considered to fall within the purview of law enforcement. The Commanding Officer admits that their mentoring program is nowhere documented as a formal policy, but the Commanding Officer, who has human resources training, takes seriously the responsibility of promoting the professional development of his staff. From his perspective, this strategy brings tremendous benefits to the department as a whole. When choosing training staff to mentor young officers, he says it`s important to choose people who can serve as a point of contact for everything from training issues and equipment requirements to general police knowledge and wellness information.
