Black in Blue: Racial Profiling and Representative Bureaucracy in Policing Revisited

This study examines the association between the degree to which a police force is ethnically representative of the population it serves and the force’s engagement in racial profiling as a policing tactic. Evidence for this study comes from English and Welsh police forces that implemented force-specific recruitment targets for officers from ethnic minority backgrounds between 2000 and 2010. Results suggest that an increase in the proportion of ethnic minorities on a police force is significantly associated with a decrease in the proportion of ethnic minorities that are stopped and searched by that police force. We also examine whether the effects of representative bureaucracy accrue nonlinearly or dynamically. This analysis failed to produce strong evidence for the “reform fatigue” and “diversity fatigue” hypotheses. Finally, we demonstrate that active representation has primarily occurred in forces in which racial profiling was intensively used as a policing tactic. These findings have implications for the democratic legitimacy of representative bureaucracy.