The Challenge Of Drawing Minorities To The Police Force

Since the Ferguson, Mo., shooting, there have been renewed calls for police departments to hire more minority officers, but it turns out it's not that simple.

Police in the U.S. are more diverse than they were a generation ago. In the 1980s, 1 in 6 officers belonged to an ethnic or racial minority. Now it's about 1 in 4. The challenge these days is finding enough recruits to keep that trend going.

The most stubborn diversity problem seems to be in the inner-ring suburbs — places where the population has shifted to majority minority, but that are still served mainly by white police.

White police such as St. Louis County officer Erich Von Almen.

In the days after the August protests in Ferguson, he and his white colleagues were on patrol in Jennings — a neighboring suburb that's also mostly African-American. He says he understood the outcry for more black officers in communities such as this but that it's easier said than done.

"We can't get more black officers. We recruit predominantly at black schools, the military, and for the life of me I don't know why. It's not the best-paying job; they'd probably do better in the private sector. That's all I can think of. But I know it's not for the lack of trying," he says.

You hear that a lot in America's inner-ring suburbs: Departments say they just can't attract enough minority applicants.

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