The Consequences of Representative Bureaucracy for Police Practice

To what extent does the entry of African American police officers to the traditionally White-Caucasian American police challenge institutionalized police practice? The traditional American police culture is epitomized by selective enforcement of mundane legal requirements, alongside aggressive pursuit of serious crime, at the expense of excessive stop, search, and arrest of innocent suspects. Minorities, and African American citizens, specifically, are the prime victims of the traditional police culture, and yet, previous research suggests that minority police officers are particularly inclined to espouse aggressive policing practices, so as to display their loyalty to their “blue” identity. Using over two million observations of police officer/driver contacts from four different US locations, we present a series of empirical analyses comparing African American and Caucasian police officers’ inclination to ticket, search and arrest drivers amidst routine vehicle stops. We find that African American police officers (compared with Caucasian police officers) are both non-selective in their enforcement of traffic violations and disinclined to employ aggressive policing practices (search and arrest) towards drivers of all ethnicities. These results, which survive a battery of robustness checks, indicate that African American police officers negate, or at least act as if they negate, the traditional policing culture. Thus, greater police representation effectively translates into active representation of aggrieved citizens’ calls for less selective and aggressive policing, which we associate with African American police officers’ identification and life experiences as minorities in society and within the police.