Over the past thirty-five years the demographics of American law enforcement have been transformed. The virtually all-white, virtually all-male police departments of the 1950s and 1960s have given way to departments with large numbers of female and minority officers, often led by female or minority chiefs. Openly gay and lesbian officers, too, are increasingly commonplace. This article explores the nature and extent of this transformation, its effects, and its ramifications for how we think about and regulate the police.

The demographic transformation of the police workforce is far from complete, and it has gone further in some departments than in others. On the whole, though, the changes are widespread and dramatic. They could have three kinds of possible effects: competence effects (ways in which minority officers, female officers, and openly gay and lesbian officers may have distinctive sets of abilities), community effects (ways in which the demographic diversity of a police department may affect its relations with the community it serves), and organizational effects (ways in which workforce diversity effect the internal dynamics of the department itself). The third category has received the least attention and is probably the most important. In particular, there is mounting evidence – increasingly commonplace among police ethnographers, but largely unfamiliar to legal academics and the broader public – that the demographic transformation of American law enforcement has done much to break down the police subculture, by weakening both the occupational solidarity and the social insularity of the police. When police departments began adopting affirmative action policies three decades ago, even some police officials sympathetic to the policies worried about factionalism and a decline in esprit de corps. As it has turned out, though, the decline in occupational solidarity is very good news. Police effectiveness does not appear to have suffered, a range of police pathologies have been ameliorated, and police reform has grown easier and less perilous.

I explore four sets of ramifications of the changing demographics of law enforcement. The first set concerns affirmative action. Here law enforcement appears to be a striking success story, but a success story in danger of ending prematurely. The evidence is strong that the demographic transformation of American law enforcement over the past few decades owes much to race-conscious remedies, typically imposed pursuant to consent decree or other court order. There are lessons here for the debate over affirmative action more broadly, and grounds for concern about future progress integrating police departments as court-ordered hiring and promotion plans expire or are rescinded. The second set of implications concerns the debate over litigation as a strategy for social reform. Here, again, the integration of police departments is a noteworthy success story – one that casts doubt on sweeping generalizations about the ineffectiveness of courts in catalyzing social large-scale change. The third set of ramifications concerns police reform. Here the lessons are twofold: continued diversification of law enforcement workplaces deserves more attention as a key component of police reform, and the diversification already accomplished should prompt reconsideration of avenues of reform previously thought too dangerous because of the solidarity and insularity of the police. The fourth and final set of implications concerns criminal procedure. The changing demographics of American law enforcement falls far short of making Warren Court criminal procedure obsolete, but it does justify more careful and nuanced thinking about race, gender, and sexuality dynamics in policing.