Does Having More Black Officers Reduce Police Violence?

The unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the death of Michael Brown in summer 2015 drew renewed scrutiny to police violence and revealed just how little the public knew about its pervasiveness. At first, there were widespread calls to address what officerslooked like since Brown was African-American and the officer who shot him is white. The dominant theory was that if police departments better reflected the racial makeup of the communities they served, incidents of police violence would decrease. Maybe, the thinking was, another result would be less friction between officers and the public.

This rationale seemed intuitive, and Ferguson offered fertile ground for testing the theory. In 2015, two in three residents in the city of 21,000 were black, but only three officers in the 53-member force were. This disparity appeared as a tangible underlying factor that may have contributed to Brown's death.

In the years since, a somewhat clearer picture about who is killed in police encounters has emerged thanks to reporting by the Washington Post, The Guardian, andMapping Police Violence project. Today, data overwhelmingly confirm that black people are involved in and are victims of police-involved killings at greater proportions than any other racial group in the country. But even as more research explores the role of race in police violence, the findings have been inconclusive and sometimes contradictory.

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