Nigel G. Fielding
Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
ABSTRACT
Recruiting ethnic minority police officers is widely seen as a way to improve police effectiveness and police/public relations, and systematic reviews are often commended as the most robust way to evaluate such policies. We argue that the tenets of classic systematic review are, however, inadequate to that task, and that a more inclusive methodological palette would advance our understanding of this and other important policing policies. Our principal empirical example is a systematic review we conducted that examined whether ethnic minority recruitment has beneficial effects on arrest rates and public satisfaction with police. After evaluating 10,791 studies, eleven satisfied methodological inclusion criteria, but they could not offer conclusive evidence on the effects of minority recruitment on arrest rates or public satisfaction. The example illustrates the obstacles to systematic reviews in contemporary police research. We then profile recent studies that benefit cumulative understanding of the effects of minority recruitment by employing more diverse methodologies, with each study addressing a distinct component that coheres around a logic model.
KEYWORDS: Ethnic Minority Police, Minority Police Recruitment, Public Relations
Introduction and context
This article originates from conducting a systematic review of the research evidence base on the relationship between increased recruitment of ethnic minority police officers and crime rates, arrest rates and public satisfaction with police. Among these three relationships the effect of minority police share on arrest rates and public opinion remain topical concerns, but interest in police effect on crime rates has been overtaken by theoretical refinement and empirical research demonstrating that the direct effect of police on crime rates is limited and that crime rates are driven by complex and interrelated causes. Indeed, where police practices are effective it results not from individual officer discretion – represented by random preventive patrol – but from the interpretation and construction of the police organisation’s mandate – represented, for example, by hotspots policing and Problem-Oriented Policing (Telep and Weisburd Citation2012). Moreover, although the relationship between officer ethnicity, arrest rates, and public opinion regarding the police remain topical, applying standard systematic review methods yielded studies of these relationships that were mostly rather dated. They preceded a period not only of theoretical refinement but of innovatory police interventions, such as systematic directed patrol and using DNA in property cases, interventions that did not register in studies selected by systematic review.
These lacunae illustrate a prime message of this article, that applying ‘classic’ systematic review methodology (whose selection criteria put large-scale quantitative random control studies at the top of a hierarchy of ‘scientific’ methods and heavily caveat or entirely exclude qualitative and mixed methods studies) to the police research evidence base reveals stark limitations. An alternative approach is needed if we are to understand the relationship between the ethnic composition of police organisations and effective police practice. In that regard, the ‘Realist Evaluation’ approach (see below) offers relevant principles and supports methodologies that are better suited to interrogating the evidence base with a view to answering the kinds of questions that evaluation research addressed to policymaking is apt to ask. Nor are the alternatives confined to Realist Evaluation. Mixed Methods research designs can extend our analytical reach, and Rapid Evidence Assessments can extend the scope and policy-relevance of the evidence base. Our argument should thus be understood as (i) a critical appraisal of the police research evidence base (ii) whose limitations render it unsuitable for the exercise of the formal conventions of classic systematic review methodology (as in, for example, large-scale control design trials performed in clinical medicine) but (iii) which does afford a secure footing for nuanced analysis and evaluation of police practice according to, inter alia, the precepts of Realist Evaluation (Pawson et al. Citation2005). Proponents of Realist Evaluation argue that the standard procedures of systematic review (statistical meta-analysis of random control trial studies with very large samples, dismissing other research designs as lacking robustness) produce findings that describe ‘what works’ but tell us little about how effective interventions work (mechanism), why they work (causality), and when and where they work (context). To set the scene for this methodological theme we need to sketch in why the ethnic composition of police forces is considered important.
Policing is a social institution whose functioning reveals the polarising effects of minority status (Donohue and Levitt Citation2001). Outright prejudice, disproportionate use of force, and double standards that disadvantage minorities have caused everyday friction and periodic violent conflict between police and minority citizens (Kerner Citation1967, Scarman Citation1981, Fielding Citation2005, Hoekstra and Sloan Citation2022). Policing in North America and Western Europe was long an ethnically white occupation, and studies across many jurisdictions find that minority citizens have less confidence in, and satisfaction with, the police than do white citizens (Walker et al. Citation1972, Decker Citation1981, Tuch and Weitzer Citation1997, Karn Citation2013, Yesberg et al. Citation2022).
Enhanced minority recruitment is prominent in policy initiatives to provide increased accountability to communities (Kerner Citation1967, Decker and Smith Citation1980, Scarman Citation1981, Macpherson Citation1999, MOPAC Citation2014). The symbolic dimension aside, pragmatics also feature. It is argued that minority officers better understand and communicate with minority citizens, defusing community tensions more effectively, using their discretion with greater cultural sensitivity, and garnering more intelligence (Kerner Citation1967, Regoli and Jerome Citation1975, Jacobs and Cohen Citation1978, Mastrofski Citation1983, Dulaney Citation1996, Brown and Frank Citation2006). Ability to overcome language barriers, a keener grasp of crime problems in minority areas, and being able to serve undercover amongst minorities, are also cited. Moreover, some look to minority officers to confront biased attitudes and prejudicial practice amongst majority officers (Maghan Citation1993, Paoline et al. Citation2000, Smith and Holmes Citation2003, Brown and Frank Citation2006).
Research has examined many dimensions of possible differences between white and minority officers in service delivery, including: how officer ethnicity influences citizen evaluations of police (e.g. Walker et al. Citation1972, Decker and Smith Citation1980, Sherman Citation1980, Engel Citation2005, Cochran and Warren Citation2012); whether ethnic and racial identity are less important than self-identity as a police officer (Alex Citation1969, Mast Citation1970, Bordua and Tifft Citation1971, Decker and Smith Citation1980); and differential propensity to use force and/or coercive powers (e.g. Alex Citation1969, Leinen Citation1984, Brown and Frank Citation2006). The broad picture is that the police/minority relationship is conditioned by social, political and economic factors that extend beyond race. Minority share of the police occupation has risen in Western democracies but uncertainty as to whether the predicted benefits have been realised still prevails (Davies et al. Citation2021).
The overview above only sketches the many ways in which ethnicity registers across the multiple dimensions of police practice, and we offer a fuller picture following presentation of the article’s empirical example. Before doing so we wish to raise a mildly epistemological argument for the necessity of addressing ethnicity in policing. Social science is founded on comparison. Comparison can expose both agency (here manifested in frontline practice and public response) and structure (here manifested in force organisation and public mandate) (Giddens Citation1986, Fielding Citation1988). Comparison – of cases, populations, outcomes – enables the recognition of differences and the identification of similarities. Searching for studies that bear on similarities and differences between minority and majority officers helps us understand the foundational core of police practice and the variation – functional or dysfunctional – around that core. In that respect, the analysis of gender in police practice that has run in parallel with the analysis of ethnicity also answers distinctive questions about what is core (Lonsway et al. Citation2002). So, apart from the importance of ethnicity and gender to policy-making in law enforcement, comparing the play of fundamental characteristics on practice, its consequent impact on citizens, and, in turn, the legitimacy accorded the police institution, is fundamental to understanding what constitutes good policing.
Complex, multiple, interrelated aetiologies surface in the kinds of outcome measures that feature in empirical attempts to explain the relationship between police ethnicity, arrest rates, and public satisfaction. Classics of the police research literature (such as Manning Citation1970, Bittner Citation1978, Muir Citation1979, Rubinstein Citation1981, Reiner Citation2010) are rich with putative explanations for these relationships. We consider it no coincidence that the prime methodology informing these classic studies is qualitative and often ethnographic. But despite their power in conceptual terms these are not the methods accepted as capable of causal explanation, transferability, and generalisation by proponents of systematic review nor by organisations championing Evidence-Based Policy such as the Campbell Collaboration. We see in some of the forays into causality in the studies selected by our systematic review a frustration on the authors’ part that they cannot, with the kind of data standardly accepted as robust, push closer to demonstrating what theory tells them is probably there. As in other applications of systematic review in our field, it seems to us that the authors of the selected studies were let down by the twin limitations of the evidence base and the rigid standards of classic systematic review methodology.
The assumption that instrumental benefits result from diversity is tested in the research literature by examining several prominent relationships. Since police have more influence over crime clearance than crime occurrence (Hur Citation2012) the relationships tested include that between organisational diversity and arrest rates. Further, since many value diversity as much as a way to promote legitimacy as to boost productivity, another prominent relationship is that between the degree of organisational diversity and citizen satisfaction with police. Yet despite the magnitude of research literature ostensibly addressing these topics, we ended our systematic review with reason to be dissatisfied both with the evidence base and with standard systematic review as a means of interrogating and evaluating it. Not least amongst their limitations, the evidence base and standard systematic review procedures produced an outcome limited wholly to the US jurisdiction and mostly to studies that were dated. Moreover, the study that seemed to offer most purchase on the relationships of interest entered our final corpus only by relaxing standard systematic review criteria. Before exploring the implications of these concerns we should profile our conduct of the review.