Racism in Law Enforcement: Disparities, Accountability, and Reform

Racism in law enforcement in the United States is a documented, systemic pattern, not a question of isolated prejudice. Black Americans are roughly 2.5 to 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans and are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.¹² Those gaps show up at every stage of a police encounter, from who gets pulled over to who gets shot, and research, litigation, federal investigations, and a 2023 United Nations review have all tied them to law, policy, and institutional history rather than to individual officers alone.

Where American Policing Came From

The first organized law enforcement bodies in the American colonies were slave patrols, established in the Carolinas in the early 1700s. These were government-sponsored groups authorized to apprehend enslaved people who had escaped, suppress revolts, and discipline enslaved populations through violence. They could enter homes by force and search for weapons.³⁴

After the Civil War, slave patrols did not disappear. They became militia-style groups that enforced Black Codes, laws enacted beginning in 1865 to restrict the freedoms, labor, movement, and economic access of formerly enslaved people. When the Fourteenth Amendment rendered Black Codes unconstitutional, Jim Crow laws took their place from the 1880s through the mid-1960s, and Southern police departments acted as their enforcers.⁴ Northern and Midwestern departments formed in the nineteenth century focused heavily on controlling populations their leaders described as a “dangerous underclass,” including African Americans, immigrants, and the poor.⁵ Officers in the 1950s and 1960s used fire hoses, dogs, and tear gas against civil rights protesters, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed over that backdrop of police violence.

How the War on Drugs Built the Modern Gap

The War on Drugs, launched in the 1970s and escalated through the 1980s and 1990s, created a new architecture of racially disparate enforcement. John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, said in a 1994 interview that the campaign was deliberately designed to target Black communities and antiwar activists. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks,” Ehrlichman said, “but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”⁶

Three federal laws built the sentencing structure that followed. The Comprehensive Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1984 eliminated federal parole. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created mandatory minimum sentences and set a 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine, so that five grams of crack triggered the same five-year mandatory sentence as 500 grams of powder. The Violent Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1994 expanded the federal death penalty, imposed a federal “three strikes” rule, and funded 100,000 additional officers. National Institute for Drug Abuse data showed more white Americans used crack cocaine, but arrests were concentrated in Black communities.⁶

Black and white Americans use illicit drugs at roughly similar rates, yet Black Americans account for about 25% of drug-related arrests while making up 14% of the population. As of 2018, Black Americans were 3.6 times as likely as white Americans to be arrested for marijuana possession despite using it at only 1.2 times the rate.⁷ Fifty-seven percent of people in state prisons for drug offenses are Black or Latino.⁸ The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 cut the crack-to-powder ratio to 18-to-1 and removed the mandatory minimum for simple crack possession, and the First Step Act of 2018 added further federal sentencing reforms.⁶

Stops, Searches, and Arrests

A large-scale analysis of 95 million police traffic stops found persistent racial bias in stop and search decisions, with Black and Hispanic drivers searched based on a lower evidentiary threshold than white drivers. Black drivers were also less likely to be stopped after sunset, when an officer cannot easily see the driver’s race.⁹

Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 2022 show 9% of Black drivers were searched or arrested during traffic stops, compared to 4% of Hispanic drivers and 3% of white drivers. The overall arrest rate that year was 4,544 per 100,000 for Black people, versus 2,155 per 100,000 for white people.¹⁰ Police were more likely to search Black (6.2%) and Latino (9.2%) drivers than white drivers (3.6%), and they were less likely to find drugs or weapons on the Black and Latino drivers they searched.⁷

New York City shows the pattern at scale. An analysis of NYPD data from 2024 found 855,750 traffic stops that year, a 25% increase from 2023. Black drivers were 10 times more likely and Latino drivers 6 times more likely than white drivers to be searched. Nearly 90% of people arrested during traffic stops were Black or Latino, and roughly 87% of drivers subjected to use of force were Black or Latino.¹¹¹²¹³

California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board, in a report released in January 2026, analyzed 5.1 million stops by 533 law enforcement agencies in 2024. Individuals perceived as Black were stopped 128% more often than their population share would predict. Civilian complaints alleging racial or identity profiling rose to 17.5% of all complaints in 2024, up from 9.7% the year before.¹⁴

Use of Force and Fatal Encounters

Black people are approximately 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.¹ A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, using 2013–2018 data, found that Black men face roughly a 1 in 1,000 lifetime chance of being killed by police, about 2.5 times the risk for white men. For Black men ages 20 to 24, police use of force is responsible for 1.6% of all deaths, a leading cause of mortality in that group. American Indian and Alaska Native men face 1.2 to 1.7 times the risk for white men.¹⁵

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt identified 10,308 police shooting incidents between 2015 and 2020, averaging 1,769 injuries per year, 55% of which were fatal. Non-Hispanic Black individuals made up 29% of those nonfatally injured. In cases where no weapon was involved, victims were 40% white, 35% Black, and 21% Hispanic, meaning Black and Hispanic people were heavily overrepresented relative to their share of the population.¹⁶ Police killings reached approximately 1,226 in 2024, and as of mid-2026 police had killed 609 people in the first months of the year.¹

Nonfatal force follows the same shape. Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 2022 show Black people were more than three times as likely as white people to experience the threat or use of nonfatal force during their most recent police encounter. While Black people accounted for 12% of police-initiated contacts, they represented 32% of all people reporting threatened or nonfatal use of force. Between 2020 and 2022, that share rose for Black people and fell for white and Hispanic people.¹⁰

The Court Decisions That Make Disparities Hard to Challenge

Two Supreme Court rulings sit at the center of modern stop-and-search practice. In Terry v. Ohio (1968), the Court held that officers may stop and frisk individuals without probable cause to arrest if they have “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been, is being, or is about to be committed, and a reasonable belief that the person may be armed. The reasonableness standard is assessed objectively, but the discretion it grants officers has been central to the expansion of stop-and-frisk practices that disproportionately target Black and Latino individuals.¹⁷

In Whren v. United States (1996), a unanimous Court held that a traffic stop is constitutional under the Fourth Amendment as long as a “reasonable officer” could have made the stop for a traffic violation, regardless of the officer’s actual motivation. The case involved two Black men stopped by plainclothes officers in an unmarked vehicle who then found drugs in the car. The petitioners argued the stop was pretextual, but the Court ruled that subjective intentions play no role in Fourth Amendment analysis and directed racial discrimination claims to the Equal Protection Clause instead.¹⁸ Legal scholars have argued that Whren effectively provided constitutional cover for racially motivated stops, because virtually any driver can be observed committing some minor traffic infraction and because proving discriminatory intent under the Equal Protection Clause is far harder than challenging a stop under the Fourth Amendment.¹⁹

Inside the Departments

Bias also runs inside police departments. A 2016 survey of nearly 8,000 officers across 54 agencies found that 92% of white officers believed the country had made the necessary changes to ensure equal rights for Black people, while only 29% of their Black colleagues agreed. Two-thirds of officers characterized protests following high-profile police killings of Black people as motivated by “anti-police bias,” while only 10% viewed them as reflecting a genuine desire for accountability.²⁰

Black and Latino officers have themselves alleged discrimination within their departments. The Hispanic National Law Enforcement Officers Association filed a federal lawsuit against Prince George’s County, Maryland, in 2018, alleging widespread racial discrimination and harassment within the department. The case settled in July 2021 with the county paying $2.3 million in compensation and $5 million in legal fees, and the department agreed to reforms of promotional and disciplinary practices.²¹ Four separate lawsuits filed against the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department have alleged a culture of racial and sexual discrimination, with claims that the department’s Equal Employment Opportunity unit colluded with management to suppress complaints.²²

A 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, declassified in unredacted form in 2020, warned that white supremacist organizations had pursued a deliberate strategy of placing members in law enforcement positions. The report described the use of “ghost skins,” members who conceal their ideological affiliations to blend into mainstream institutions, and documented cases of officers with ties to white supremacist organizations committing civil rights violations. The FBI concluded that such infiltration “can result in other abuses of authority and passive tolerance of racism within communities served.”²³ A 2020 Brennan Center report found that since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged white supremacist connections had been identified in over a dozen states, and hundreds of officers had been caught expressing racist views on social media.²⁴

Algorithms and Predictive Policing

Newer tools have added a technical layer to older patterns. Predictive policing systems, gunshot detection, and surveillance platforms are frequently deployed in low-income communities of color. Because the algorithms rely on historical crime data generated by decades of racially skewed enforcement, they create feedback loops: more police presence in targeted neighborhoods produces more arrests, which the algorithm then reads as evidence those neighborhoods warrant more policing.²⁵

Research has found that place-based algorithms disproportionately target Black and Latino residents and areas with high concentrations of public housing, and the proprietary nature of many systems makes independent auditing difficult.²⁵ In December 2024, U.S. Senators wrote to the Department of Justice citing “mounting evidence” that predictive policing technologies fail to reduce crime and instead worsen racial disparities, calling on the DOJ to stop funding these systems until proper audits and due process reviews are conducted.²⁶ Santa Cruz, California, became the first U.S. city to ban the technology in 2020.²⁷ No comprehensive federal regulation currently governs the use of AI or surveillance technologies in policing.

Indigenous Communities

Disparities in American policing are often framed as a Black-and-white issue, but Native Americans face distinct and heavy burdens. American Indian and Alaska Native men face a lifetime risk of being killed by police 1.2 to 1.7 times higher than for white men.¹⁵ California’s 2024 stop data show force was used most often against individuals perceived as Native American, Black, or Hispanic.¹⁴ In Pennington County, South Dakota, Native Americans account for 55% of the jail population while representing between 10% and 25% of the total population.⁹

Over 84% of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, and fewer than half of violent victimizations against Native women are reported to police. Jurisdictional overlap among federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement delays investigations, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates approximately 4,200 missing and murdered cases remain unsolved. Indigenous women are frequently misclassified as Hispanic, Asian, or other categories on missing-person forms, producing significant undercounts.²⁸

The Accountability Gap

Criminal prosecution of officers who kill civilians is extraordinarily rare. Of the more than 1,000 police killings each year, only about 1% result in criminal charges, according to the UN International Independent Expert Mechanism.²⁹ Since 2005, only 35 non-federal officers have been convicted of crimes related to fatal on-duty shootings, and only three of those convictions were for murder.² Despite rising fatality numbers, the number of officers charged with murder or manslaughter has stayed roughly flat at around 16 per year in both 2020 and 2024.³⁰

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020 produced a rare exception. Chauvin was convicted on three state charges of murder and manslaughter in April 2021 and later pleaded guilty to federal civil rights violations, and three other officers involved were found guilty in federal court of depriving Floyd of his civil rights. Other post-2020 cases include the conviction of officer Kim Potter for the manslaughter of Daunte Wright, and the firing and charging of five officers in the beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. More than 30 criminal cases involving the Nichols officers were subsequently dismissed over concerns about those officers’ reliability as witnesses.³⁰

Where accountability happens, it is often financial and borne by taxpayers. New York City paid $175.9 million in civil judgments related to police misconduct in fiscal year 2019. Chicago paid $500 million for misconduct lawsuits between 2004 and 2014.²

What Reforms Have and Haven’t Done

The murder of George Floyd produced a wave of state-level reform. Between May 2020 and December 2022, 48 states enacted at least one new police accountability policy, with 226 bills proposed or enacted nationwide.³¹³²⁹

A Johns Hopkins analysis concluded that significant accountability gaps persist, driven by thin enforcement mechanisms, lack of dedicated funding, and the absence of a centralized national database for tracking officer misconduct.³¹

Implicit bias training is widely adopted but has produced mixed evidence. A randomized controlled trial of 14,471 NYPD officers found “no estimated training effects achieved statistical significance” in reducing racial disparities in stops, arrests, searches, or use of force.³³ An evaluation of the Anti-Defamation League’s training across 3,764 officers found that it increased officers’ knowledge of implicit bias, but the effects were “fleeting” and there was “little evidence for long-term efficacy” in changing behavior.³⁴ A Sacramento Police Department study of a program that combined classroom instruction with simulation-based counter-bias training did find measurable improvement in officer performance and a significant decrease in discrimination complaints, suggesting repeated scenario-based practice and debriefing matter more than a single training day.³⁵

Non-police crisis response has been tested as a diversion model. Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program, founded in 1989, dispatched a mental health crisis worker and a medic to behavioral health and non-emergency calls. In 2019, CAHOOTS handled approximately 24,000 calls and requested police backup only 311 times. Denver’s STAR program diverted 748 calls in its first six months.³⁶

International Review

In September 2023, the UN International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement released findings from a country visit to the United States. The experts concluded that systemic racism pervades U.S. police and justice systems, describing it as a “legacy of slavery, the slave trade, and 100 years of legalized apartheid,” and they explicitly rejected the “bad apple” theory, finding that abusive behavior by individual officers is part of a broader institutional pattern.²⁹ The report noted that Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police and 4.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white people, identified white supremacy ideologies inside police agencies and systemic racism against Black officers, and recommended that the United States reform use-of-force standards to align with international norms and stop deploying armed police as default first responders for mental health crises and homelessness.³⁷

Where Federal Policy Stands Now

The federal government’s posture has shifted sharply. On April 28, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14288, directing the Attorney General to review all ongoing federal consent decrees with state and local law enforcement agencies within 60 days and to “modify, rescind, or move to conclude” measures that “unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.” The order also directed increased transfer of surplus military equipment to local police and created mechanisms for providing legal resources and indemnification to officers.³⁸

On May 21, 2025, the DOJ announced it was dismissing lawsuits against police departments in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, both filed under the Biden administration following investigations that found patterns of constitutional violations. The DOJ also retracted its findings regarding departments in Phoenix, Memphis, Trenton, Mount Vernon, Oklahoma City, and the Louisiana State Police. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon called the prior administration’s consent decrees “overbroad” measures that “divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs,” and said future enforcement would focus on prosecuting individual “bad actors in uniform” rather than pursuing systemic reform.³⁹ A federal judge in Minneapolis granted the DOJ’s motion on May 27, 2025, dismissing the proposed consent decree with prejudice; Mayor Jacob Frey then issued an executive order directing city employees to implement the reforms voluntarily.⁴⁰ The DOJ is expected to seek termination of existing consent decrees in more than a dozen additional jurisdictions.⁴¹ The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, launched in December 2023 under a Biden executive order, was taken offline in January 2025.³⁰

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was reintroduced in the 119th Congress on September 15, 2025, by Representative Glenn Ivey with 122 cosponsors. The bill would lower the criminal intent standard for prosecuting officers from “willfulness” to “recklessness,” reform qualified immunity, establish a national police misconduct registry, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, and grant the DOJ subpoena power for pattern-and-practice investigations.⁴² It has not advanced beyond introduction.

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