The Race Gap in America’s Police Departments
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As far as I'm aware, most police forces require at least an Associates Degree, if not a Bachelors Degree. So to compare racial makeup of the community as a whole and that of the police force is unfair. It suggests, without explicitly stating it that the police force is inherently racist. If they were just comparing the racial makeup of community members with degrees to the police force, I think it would be a more fair comparison. The largest disparities in racial makeup are going to tend to be in poorer cities, which will naturally lead to fewer people with degrees.
It is also worth stating, that from a psychological perspective, a poor city with more crime is going to be harder on a cop mentally and make them more likely to misbehave and overreact. Coupled with the racial disparity (which as aforementioned is likely caused by outer forces), could lead to racial tensions.
The problem was not with black cops, Lott’s study showed, but rather with the lowering of standards across the board, resulting in less-qualified officers of every race. To get more of MSNBC’s “voices of oppression” on police forces, requirements are reduced for all recruits. (Just as quality declined at MSNBC when “voices of oppression” had to be added to their lineup.)
Therefore the obvious question is, is the purported increase in violent crime outweighed by other advantages in total social cost? If so, then by his own statements, it's worthwhile.
(Eg, does violent crime then decrease by 5% in the second year?, does the number of petty crimes drop by 50%?, is there an increase in the tax base?, etc.)
Without that, picking out only a single negative is not enough to be actionable.
Also, the data for the paper comes from 1987, 1990, and 1993, and it uses murder rates as a estimate to judge if there are confounding factors. (The paper rightly points out the numbers are based on reported crimes, and not actual crime numbers. It's possible that the report rates go up if, say, black citizens are more likely to report crimes if they feel there won't be a racial bias against them.)
However, the homicide rate in the US in the 1987 was 8.3/100K while in 1990 it was 9.4 and in 1993 it was 9.5. The rate now is half that level. Despite the statistics in the paper, it's impossible to say if the current low level is a direct result of those actions to diversify the police force.
I also think the baseline is rather short, and we have another 30 years of the same sort of data, so it really need to be repeated with a larger data set before I can place any sort of trust in it.
Eg, and quoting from the paper:
> After spending “$5.1 million to have consultants develop unbiased exams, only to have minorities fare poorly again,” Chicago moved to a heavily weighted seniority system for promoting police officers and a lottery system for hiring firefighters (Spielman, 1996, p. 16)
Thus, the supposition in the paper is that those cognitive tests correctly measured skills needed for law enforcement, and with that in supposition in place, it tries to estimate the impact of the changes, concluding that they were negative.
I don't find the paper persuasive. I don't think the hypothesis is tested well enough, I don't see a model for how the police force composition could change so drastically after only 5 years, and I don't like the short baseline of the analysis.