Who is Policing the Community? A Comprehensive Review of Discrimination in Police Departments

This paper is a systematic review of the literature on diversity in police forces. We focus on four main empirical domains that have received the bulk of the attention in the literature 1) recruitment 2) hiring, 3) promotion, 4) organizational contexts. We argue that this literature would be better served by integrating findings into the emerging theoretical framework of racialized organizations theory (Ray et al. 2017) which sees organizations as a key meso‐level factor reproducing both individual and state level racial inequality. Building from here, we described our methodological approach for systematically reviewing the extant literature and present our findings. Lastly, we conclude with highlighting sociopolitical and policy implications uncovered by our findings, for contemporary American policing.