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America Is Losing Its Black Police Officers
When Ray Kelly was appointed commissioner of the New York Police Department, in 1992, he announced that his No. 1 priority was to recruit more Black officers to the force. “Without these actions, there will be increased tension between the communities and the police,” Kelly told The New York Times. “Tension leads to hostilities and that will lead to more cries of racism in the department.”
Kelly was not alone. The same year, Willie Williams became the first Black chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, which since 1980 had been under court order to produce a force that looked more like the city it patrolled—and which had been roiled by the beating of Rodney King in 1991. Williams promised to hire more Black officers. So did mayors such as Marion Barry of Washington, D.C., and Chicago’s Richard Daley, who in 1995 said, “You have to have a diversity, and that diversity includes everyone.”
These diversification efforts were largely successful. American police forces became far more representative of their communities, adding women, Black officers, and members of other minority groups. But some of America’s largest police forces are suddenly—and quickly—getting less diverse, as two trends converge: A wave of Black officers is reaching retirement age, and recruitment efforts to replace them are sputtering.
The NYPD has seen a 14 percent drop in Black officers since 2008, from a high of 4,162 to 3,598 this September. Black employment in the Philadelphia Police Department has fallen 19 percent since 2017. The number of Black officers in the Chicago Police Department has dropped by 12 percent since May 2019. Even Washington, D.C., long a leader in minority-police recruitment, has had a 25 percent decrease since 1998, when two-thirds of officers were Black, to 50 percent today, though the city also got whiter over that time period. The LAPD has seen a 24 percent drop in Black officers, from 1,175 in 2010 to 885 today, though the department’s ranks have also shrunk.
Gathering a complete national view of demographic changes is effectively impossible. The United States has more than 18,000 police departments, many of them tiny and all with their own practices for collecting and releasing data. But the data from the big departments all point in the same direction and match anecdotal reports: America’s police forces are getting less Black, and some are getting whiter.
As recently as the 1960s, some cities had no Black officers; others didn’t allow them to carry guns or arrest white suspects. But many departments have made major improvements on minority hiring, through a combination of court-ordered changes, political pressure, and the occasional visionary leader. Surveys from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the percentage of Black officers nationwide rose steadily from 1987 (9.3 percent) to 2013 (11.9 percent). There was a particular influx in the ’90s, fed by a growing political focus on diversity combined with the 1994 crime bill, which provided federal funding to hire 100,000 new police officers around the country.
Those unusual gains, however, sowed the seeds of the impending collapse in Black-police ranks. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s, there was a big hiring push,” says Captain Aaron McCraney, who leads the LAPD’s recruitment and employment division. “Consequently, especially when it comes to African Americans, a lot of those people are at the point in their careers where it’s a natural attrition. It’s naturally occurring because of that hiring surge.”
Many members of the cohort of officers who joined the force in the ’80s and ’90s are now reaching retirement age. By 2016, the most recent year for which Bureau of Justice data are available, the proportion of Black officers had dipped to 11.4 percent.
The available data suggest that what McCraney is seeing in Los Angeles is happening in large departments across the nation—deepening the pre-2016 trends. A survey by the Police Executive Research Forum this summer found a 45 percent annual increase in retirement rates at responding agencies, including a 27 percent increase in departments with at least 500 officers. Agencies also reported a significant jump in officers resigning preretirement. (The reasons for this phenomenon are not well understood.)
This exodus couldn’t come at a more difficult moment. Following the murder of George Floyd last year and other high-profile instances of police violence, American cities erupted in the largest protests in generations, if not ever. Police departments are facing new political pressures, and relationships between departments and Black Americans are at a low point—which makes reversing the demographic trend both more pressing and more challenging.
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Kelly was not alone. The same year, Willie Williams became the first Black chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, which since 1980 had been under court order to produce a force that looked more like the city it patrolled—and which had been roiled by the beating of Rodney King in 1991. Williams promised to hire more Black officers. So did mayors such as Marion Barry of Washington, D.C., and Chicago’s Richard Daley, who in 1995 said, “You have to have a diversity, and that diversity includes everyone.”
These diversification efforts were largely successful. American police forces became far more representative of their communities, adding women, Black officers, and members of other minority groups. But some of America’s largest police forces are suddenly—and quickly—getting less diverse, as two trends converge: A wave of Black officers is reaching retirement age, and recruitment efforts to replace them are sputtering.
The NYPD has seen a 14 percent drop in Black officers since 2008, from a high of 4,162 to 3,598 this September. Black employment in the Philadelphia Police Department has fallen 19 percent since 2017. The number of Black officers in the Chicago Police Department has dropped by 12 percent since May 2019. Even Washington, D.C., long a leader in minority-police recruitment, has had a 25 percent decrease since 1998, when two-thirds of officers were Black, to 50 percent today, though the city also got whiter over that time period. The LAPD has seen a 24 percent drop in Black officers, from 1,175 in 2010 to 885 today, though the department’s ranks have also shrunk.
Gathering a complete national view of demographic changes is effectively impossible. The United States has more than 18,000 police departments, many of them tiny and all with their own practices for collecting and releasing data. But the data from the big departments all point in the same direction and match anecdotal reports: America’s police forces are getting less Black, and some are getting whiter.
As recently as the 1960s, some cities had no Black officers; others didn’t allow them to carry guns or arrest white suspects. But many departments have made major improvements on minority hiring, through a combination of court-ordered changes, political pressure, and the occasional visionary leader. Surveys from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the percentage of Black officers nationwide rose steadily from 1987 (9.3 percent) to 2013 (11.9 percent). There was a particular influx in the ’90s, fed by a growing political focus on diversity combined with the 1994 crime bill, which provided federal funding to hire 100,000 new police officers around the country.
Those unusual gains, however, sowed the seeds of the impending collapse in Black-police ranks. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s, there was a big hiring push,” says Captain Aaron McCraney, who leads the LAPD’s recruitment and employment division. “Consequently, especially when it comes to African Americans, a lot of those people are at the point in their careers where it’s a natural attrition. It’s naturally occurring because of that hiring surge.”
Many members of the cohort of officers who joined the force in the ’80s and ’90s are now reaching retirement age. By 2016, the most recent year for which Bureau of Justice data are available, the proportion of Black officers had dipped to 11.4 percent.
The available data suggest that what McCraney is seeing in Los Angeles is happening in large departments across the nation—deepening the pre-2016 trends. A survey by the Police Executive Research Forum this summer found a 45 percent annual increase in retirement rates at responding agencies, including a 27 percent increase in departments with at least 500 officers. Agencies also reported a significant jump in officers resigning preretirement. (The reasons for this phenomenon are not well understood.)
This exodus couldn’t come at a more difficult moment. Following the murder of George Floyd last year and other high-profile instances of police violence, American cities erupted in the largest protests in generations, if not ever. Police departments are facing new political pressures, and relationships between departments and Black Americans are at a low point—which makes reversing the demographic trend both more pressing and more challenging.
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