How has the Fort Worth Police Department done at hiring diverse officers? Here’s a look.
The Fort Worth Police Department has further diversified its ranks since 2018, when the city’s Race and Culture Task Force highlighted imbalances in its racial and ethnic demographics. But more work is needed for the department to fully reflect the city it serves.
Two years ahead of schedule, the department has met the Task Force’s 2023 goal for Hispanic officers. The department is closing in on goals for Black officers and female officers.
As of June 2021, the population of the department’s sworn officers was 10% African American (2 percent short of the 2023 goal), 22% Hispanic (1 percent better than the 2023 goal), and 13% female (1 percent short of the 2023 goal).
Diversity goals too low?
Current demographics of the department don’t match Fort Worth’s latest demographic data, which shows the city as 39% white, 35% Hispanic, 19% Black, 5% Asian and 2% other.
Estella Williams, president of Fort Worth’s NAACP branch, said the goal for Black officers is set too low. They should make up at least 25 percent of the department’s sworn officers, she said.
“The city must implement serious recruitment initiatives to accomplish the goal of hiring, promoting and maintaining African-American police officers,” Williams said in a prepared statement.
She recommends that the department spend extra time in cities, schools and rural areas where recruiting efforts haven’t been concentrated in the past. She said an initiative like this needs devoted leadership that’s “serious about correcting this conspicuous absence.”
Sean Nicholson-Crotty is a professor at Indiana University who studies how police diversity affects people of color’s crime outcomes such, as deaths at the hands of police and levels of force used. He said departments face challenges when recruiting people of color because of the “overwhelming evidence that police tend to sanction ... individuals of color at higher levels than other individuals.” A Sentencing Project report to the United Nations pointed to several studies highlighting that African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be arrested, convicted and receive long prison sentences.
Research suggests that because of their higher incidence of contact with police, people of color are less likely to have clean records to pass police academy applications, Nicholson-Crotty said.
Manny Ramirez, president of the Fort Worth Police Officer’s Association, said the focus on diversifying the police department will pay dividends.
“Some of those communities have difficulty forging connections with those officers,” Ramirez said. “Once you get officers that look like the communities they serve, I think that’s kind of a self-solving problem.”
Ramirez said other solutions to building trust include improving communication between communities and the department and more community policing efforts, where officers live in the neighborhoods they patrol.
Cities such as Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. , have minority-majority police departments. Other cities such as Houston have evened out their police demographics to be more reflective of their city demographics in recent years.
Fort Worth Police Department’s success, particularly in hiring Hispanic officers, can be attributed to programs such as #BeTheChange, spearheaded by Assistant Chief Julie Swearingin.
“Two things triggered the thought behind the campaign: our police department not mirroring the city we serve and civil unrest over the years with the community voicing their concern about how they felt they were being policed,” Swearingin said.
Since its inception in 2019, #BeTheChange has focused on recruiting minority and female candidates with outreach efforts in diverse communities. Swearingin serves as a mentor for candidates, encouraging them to join the police force from the time they show interest to the time they become police officers. Swearingin has open communication lines with candidates and helps train them for their civil service and physical tests.
“I even showed up during the civil service testing dates, so they could see that I was serious about supporting them and wanting them to join the police department,” she said.
Research is mixed
A police force that reflects the racial makeup of Fort Worth is important for the community and the department, leaders say. But research on how much a diverse police force improves community trust is mixed.
A study released in February found Black and Latino officers were less likely to make stops and arrests against Black civilians, based on Chicago police department records of over a million citations, traffic stops, arrests and other sanctions. Female officers were also found to use less force than male officers in the same study.
“When you call for police assistance, the situation could be traumatic and emotions run high,” Swearingin said in an email interview. “I personally think seeing someone that looks like you responding to assist can somewhat ease nerves.”
Some studies have shown the benefits of a “representative bureaucracy” effect, where minority communities see themselves reflected in the people they serve and are therefore more likely to behave in ways that would benefit that group, Nicholson-Crotty, the Indiana University professor, said.
But there are some studies that show the opposite. A 2004 study by university professors Ivan Sun and Brian Payne in West Palm Beach Florida found that Black officers were more likely to use physical force than their white counterparts in conflict situations. Evidence Nicholson-Crotty recently found in a study comparing data from four U.S. cities suggests that Black citizens don’t respond differently to Black officers and are slightly more likely to file complaints against them.
But Nicholson-Crotty said there’s likely to be a lot of unmeasured evidence about the benefits of diverse police departments.
“Police forces should represent the communities that they police,” he said. “I firmly believe that even if we don’t have ... a causal relationship between this variable and that variable.”
Diversity in the Fort Worth Police Department is a start in building community trust, Swearingin said.
“If you reflect the community you serve, you can view things from a common perspective,” she said.
Nicholson-Crotty said there are other ways to improve interactions between people of color and police. Some cheaper methods include screening to analyze an officer’s tendencies toward conflict or his or her level of awareness of other cultures, he said.
“The types of problems we’re trying to solve with diversity, we should also look at solving in other ways, because there are other ways, while still promoting as much representation in the force as we can,” Nicholson-Crotty said.
Swearingin said she hopes to eventually have a force that represents Fort Worth’s demographics. The department has committed to having a 30% female department by 2030.
