Professor David Sklansky discusses the need for more diverse police forces in this Vox article by German Lopez.

Neill Franklin is a black man. But he’ll admit that after decades of working at the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland State Police, he harbored a strong bias against young black men.

Franklin, now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs , explained, “When I’d see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s selling drugs.'”

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“When departments concentrate enforcement efforts, for example, in high-crime areas, those areas are likely to be areas with disproportionate numbers of minority residents,” David Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford Law School, said. “That means minority residents of the community are getting policed more intensely than people that live in other neighborhoods that have smaller proportion of minority residents and lower crime rates.”

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What’s worse, Sklansky said this type of disproportionate enforcement can create “a vicious cycle” in which black residents are fearful of police, making them more likely to display discomfort around cops, which in turn makes officers more likely to perceive black residents as suspicious. “Part of the way police patrol is to look for people who look like they’re acting suspicious,” Sklansky said. “So even a police officer who tries not to be racist can wind up giving more of his attention and having more of his suspicion directed to members of minority groups than to white citizens.”

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Creating more diverse police forces can also help police departments build trust, according to Sklansky of Stanford University. “There’s less likely to be an us-and-them attitude between police and the community,” he said. “A diverse department can still have problems keeping the trust or even gaining in the first place the trust of minority communities, but it’s likely to have fewer problems than a department that’s monolithically white or doesn’t reflect the demographics of the community.”

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“Nothing solves racism completely,” Sklansky said. “Racism in general is a deeply entrenched problem in all societies, including America’s. We’ve made enormous strides in the United States in confronting that problem in some ways but not in others.”