Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Studies in representative bureaucracy have well established the link between passive representation and beneficial outcomes to the groups being represented. However, only a handful of research thus far has investigated whether representation provides net benefits to the organization. Using traffic stop as the avenue, this paper aims to add to the literature by examining the relationship between representation and organizational performance in the context of policing. Accumulated evidence in social psychology shows that most officers are not immune to implicit biases to treat black suspects more aggressively than similarly situated white ones, despite careful considerations to be racially neutral in conscious decision-making. Consequently, there widely exists inefficiency in traffic enforcement. White officers may waste time and resources in unnecessary and discriminatory search of minority drivers who have a low probability of possessing contraband (i.e. low hit rate), based on faulty assumptions of minority criminality. Drawing from representation theory, however, we postulate that increased minority representation on police force improves policing efficiency and accuracy on aggregate.

Two pathways lead to performance improvement. First, minority bureaucrats arguably have less subconscious bias towards minority citizens who share their social identities. Same identity frequently comes with shared culture, experiences, values and norms, inducing greater cooperation and thus more efficient interactions between the two parties. Therefore, minority representation on police reduces the likelihood that an encounter deteriorates to the point where an officer must take discriminatory and inefficient actions toward minority motorists. We therefore hypothesize that minority officers have higher hit rates when searching minority drivers, than white officers. Secondly, behavioral modifications among non-minority officers contribute to the enhanced performance as well. Representation research proposes that workforce diversity improves performance by introducing organizational change, adaption and learning. The presence of minority bureaucrats may either re-socialize majority bureaucrats to understand minority clientele better and thus behave more fairly towards them, or act as a constraint, restricting majority bureaucrats who may otherwise act upon their biases against minority. Either way, we expect that hit rates for white officers searching minority drivers increase when they work with a larger number of minority officers.

The data come from over 8 million traffic stops in South Carolina (2005-2016). They contain rich information on each pull over that enables us to empirically test the two mechanisms noted above. First, we utilize characteristics of both drivers and officers, testing whether policing efficiency is higher among minority-minority stops. Second, we identify each officer with a unique ID and associate them with colleagues working in the same administrative unit. As such, we can examine the impact of minority presence on white officers’ actions. Early evidence shows preliminary support for the assertions. The ranking order of search among officers is Hispanic > Black > White, and the order of hit is White > Hispanic > Black. White and black officers are the most accurate when searching their in-group members. Search rates are higher in minority districts, but so do hit rates. Policing accuracy is observed particularly for minority drivers in districts with higher minority representation.