diversity in law enforcement essay

Diversity in policing can improve police-civilian interactions, say Princeton researchers

Illustration by Egan Jimenez, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

The recent killings of Black Americans have reignited calls for policing reform, including proposals to diversify police departments, which have historically been made up of primarily white, male officers. Yet, few studies have examined whether deploying minority and female officers actually changes police-civilian interactions or reduces instances of shootings and reported misconduct.

Jonathan Mummolo

A study first debuted Feb. 7 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science  2021 Annual Meeting harnesses newly collected data from the Chicago Police Department to show that deploying officers of different backgrounds does, in fact, produce large differences in how police treat civilians.

The researchers link millions of daily patrol assignments with police officer demographics to show that Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests and use less force than white officers, especially against Black civilians, when facing otherwise common circumstances. Hispanic officers also engage in less enforcement activity. Female officers of all races also use less force than males.

The findings , featured on the cover of the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science , suggest that increasing diversity within police departments may decrease police mistreatment of minority communities.  

“A first step in assessing the impact of diversity policies is to test whether officers with different demographic profiles actually do their jobs differently while holding circumstances constant,” said study co-author Jonathan Mummolo , assistant professor of politics and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs . “Using rare microlevel data on when and where thousands of officers are deployed over time, we are able to make these comparisons, and we find substantial disparities in officer behavior even when facing comparable places, times and civilians.” 

Mummolo co-authored the paper with Bocar Ba of the University of California, Irvine ; Dean Knox of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ; and Roman Rivera of Columbia University . Mummolo and Knox have published a number of studies together in recent years looking at policing tactics and reforms in the United States.

Given the recent widespread calls for law enforcement reforms, especially following the death of George Floyd in 2020, the researchers wanted to determine how the deployment of officers from different racial, ethnic and gender identities might affect the treatment of civilians.

They used new, high-resolution data on police personnel activity in Chicago, which has a history of racial tensions between residents and the police. This microlevel data indicated not just that an arrest had happened, but where, by whom, at what time, on what charge, plus many features of the civilian and officer involved. Chicago provided an invaluable opportunity to study diversity in policing as both the city and department are highly diverse.

The researchers drew on data assembled through years of open records requests, which included the race and ethnicity, language skills, daily shift assignments, and career progression of roughly 7,000 individual officers. They then linked these files to time-stamped, geolocated records of those officers’ arrests, traffic stops and use of force against civilians from 2012-15. These data included 2.9 million officer shifts and 1.6 million enforcement “events.” Due to limited data, the researchers only looked at only Black, Hispanic, and white officers, which made up 97% of the sample.  

The researchers then created a dataset documenting the circumstances and outcomes of each officer-shift, to allow for comparisons of officers of different demographic profiles working in highly similar places and times. This allowed them to see how officers of different backgrounds behaved in similar circumstances.

They found Black officers made substantially fewer stops, arrests and uses of force per shift than white officers, reductions equal to 29%, 21% and 32% of average white officer behavior citywide. The findings are similar for Hispanic and female officers, though the differences are more modest.

“These patterns are remarkably in line with the hopes of proponents of racial diversification, which seeks to reduce abusive policing and mass incarceration, especially in Black communities,” Mummolo said.

While the researchers cannot discern bias or intent based on these data, one explanation for the differences could be racial bias, they said. Further study with additional data is needed to understand the mechanisms behind these differences in police behavior.

The study also stresses that the effects of diversity in policing are more complex than often recognized. While this study focused on race, ethnicity and gender, police officers are multidimensional human beings. This means enacting effective personnel reforms will likely require thinking beyond these categories. Nevertheless, the study provides a framework for other scholars to evaluate and re-evaluate the effects of diversity in policing in America.

“ The role of officer race and gender in police-civilian interactions in Chicago ,” by Bocar A. Ba, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo and Roman Rivera appears in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd8694 ).

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Solving racial disparities in policing

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Experts say approach must be comprehensive as roots are embedded in culture

“ Unequal ” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. The first part explores the experience of people of color with the criminal justice legal system in America.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform.

This is not the first time in recent decades that high-profile police violence — from the 1991 beating of Rodney King to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 — ignited calls for change. But this time appears different. The police killings of Breonna Taylor in March, George Floyd in May, and a string of others triggered historic, widespread marches and rallies across the nation, from small towns to major cities, drawing protesters of unprecedented diversity in race, gender, and age.

According to historians and other scholars, the problem is embedded in the story of the nation and its culture. Rooted in slavery, racial disparities in policing and police violence, they say, are sustained by systemic exclusion and discrimination, and fueled by implicit and explicit bias. Any solution clearly will require myriad new approaches to law enforcement, courts, and community involvement, and comprehensive social change driven from the bottom up and the top down.

While police reform has become a major focus, the current moment of national reckoning has widened the lens on systemic racism for many Americans. The range of issues, though less familiar to some, is well known to scholars and activists. Across Harvard, for instance, faculty members have long explored the ways inequality permeates every aspect of American life. Their research and scholarship sits at the heart of a new Gazette series starting today aimed at finding ways forward in the areas of democracy; wealth and opportunity; environment and health; and education. It begins with this first on policing.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people.

Photo by Martha Stewart

The history of racialized policing

Like many scholars, Khalil Gibran Muhammad , professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School , traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people. This legacy, he believes, can still be seen in policing today. “The surveillance, the deputization essentially of all white men to be police officers or, in this case, slave patrollers, and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning,” he  told NPR  last year.

Slave patrols, and the slave codes they enforced, ended after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th amendment, which formally ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” But Muhammad notes that former Confederate states quickly used that exception to justify new restrictions. Known as the Black codes, the various rules limited the kinds of jobs African Americans could hold, their rights to buy and own property, and even their movements.

“The genius of the former Confederate states was to say, ‘Oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that’s what we’ll do.’ And that’s exactly what the Black codes set out to do. The Black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn’t criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man’s terms.” In particular, he said the Ku Klux Klan “took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling Black people. … The Klan totally dominates the machinery of justice in the South.”

When, during what became known as the Great Migration, millions of African Americans fled the still largely agrarian South for opportunities in the thriving manufacturing centers of the North, they discovered that metropolitan police departments tended to enforce the law along racial and ethnic lines, with newcomers overseen by those who came before. “There was an early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks whom they were focused on policing,” Muhammad said. “And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish or the Germans are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles.” And then arrived a wave of Black Southerners looking for a better life.

In his groundbreaking work, “ The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America ,” Muhammad argues that an essential turning point came in the early 1900s amid efforts to professionalize police forces across the nation, in part by using crime statistics to guide law enforcement efforts. For the first time, Americans with European roots were grouped into one broad category, white, and set apart from the other category, Black.

Citing Muhammad’s research, Harvard historian Jill Lepore  has summarized the consequences this way : “Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

“History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful sense,” Muhammad wrote. Instead, crime statistics were “weaponized” to justify racial profiling, police brutality, and ever more policing of Black people.

This phenomenon, he believes, has continued well into this century and is exemplified by William J. Bratton, one of the most famous police leaders in recent America history. Known as “America’s Top Cop,” Bratton led police departments in his native Boston, Los Angeles, and twice in New York, finally retiring in 2016.

Bratton rejected notions that crime was a result of social and economic forces, such as poverty, unemployment, police practices, and racism. Instead, he said in a 2017 speech, “It is about behavior.” Through most of his career, he was a proponent of statistically-based “predictive” policing — essentially placing forces in areas where crime numbers were highest, focused on the groups found there.

Bratton argued that the technology eliminated the problem of prejudice in policing, without ever questioning potential bias in the data or algorithms themselves — a significant issue given the fact that Black Americans are arrested and convicted of crimes at disproportionately higher rates than whites. This approach has led to widely discredited practices such as racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk.” And, Muhammad notes, “There is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.”

Gathering numbers

In 2015 The Washington Post began tracking every fatal shooting by an on-duty officer, using news stories, social media posts, and police reports in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. According to the newspaper, Black Americans are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans, and Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Such efforts have proved useful for researchers such as economist Rajiv Sethi .

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard  Radcliffe Institute , Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, a difficult task given that data from such encounters is largely unavailable from police departments. Instead, Sethi and his team of researchers have turned to information collected by websites and news organizations including The Washington Post and The Guardian, merged with data from other sources such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Census, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Rajiv Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers,

Courtesy photo

They have found that exposure to deadly force is highest in the Mountain West and Pacific regions relative to the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states, and that racial disparities in relation to deadly force are even greater than the national numbers imply. “In the country as a whole, you’re about two to three times more likely to face deadly force if you’re Black than if you are white” said Sethi. “But if you look at individual cities separately, disparities in exposure are much higher.”

Examining the characteristics associated with police departments that experience high numbers of lethal encounters is one way to better understand and address racial disparities in policing and the use of violence, Sethi said, but it’s a massive undertaking given the decentralized nature of policing in America. There are roughly 18,000 police departments in the country, and more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices, each with its own approaches to training and selection.

“They behave in very different ways, and what we’re finding in our current research is that they are very different in the degree to which they use deadly force,” said Sethi. To make real change, “You really need to focus on the agency level where organizational culture lies, where selection and training protocols have an effect, and where leadership can make a difference.”

Sethi pointed to the example of Camden, N.J., which disbanded and replaced its police force in 2013, initially in response to a budget crisis, but eventually resulting in an effort to fundamentally change the way the police engaged with the community. While there have been improvements, including greater witness cooperation, lower crime, and fewer abuse complaints, the Camden case doesn’t fit any particular narrative, said Sethi, noting that the number of officers actually increased as part of the reform. While the city is still faced with its share of problems, Sethi called its efforts to rethink policing “important models from which we can learn.”

Fighting vs. preventing crime

For many analysts, the real problem with policing in America is the fact that there is simply too much of it. “We’ve seen since the mid-1970s a dramatic increase in expenditures that are associated with expanding the criminal legal system, including personnel and the tasks we ask police to do,” said Sandra Susan Smith , Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at HKS, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. “And at the same time we see dramatic declines in resources devoted to social welfare programs.”

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson, but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work,” said Brandon Terry, assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies.

Kris Snibble/Harvard file photo

Smith’s comment highlights a key argument embraced by many activists and experts calling for dramatic police reform: diverting resources from the police to better support community services including health care, housing, and education, and stronger economic and job opportunities. They argue that broader support for such measures will decrease the need for policing, and in turn reduce violent confrontations, particularly in over-policed, economically disadvantaged communities, and communities of color.

For Brandon Terry , that tension took the form of an ice container during his Baltimore high school chemistry final. The frozen cubes were placed in the middle of the classroom to help keep the students cool as a heat wave sent temperatures soaring. “That was their solution to the building’s lack of air conditioning,” said Terry, a Harvard assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies. “Just grab an ice cube.”

Terry’s story is the kind many researchers cite to show the negative impact of underinvesting in children who will make up the future population, and instead devoting resources toward policing tactics that embrace armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and spy planes. Terry’s is also the kind of tale promoted by activists eager to defund the police, a movement begun in the late 1960s that has again gained momentum as the death toll from violent encounters mounts. A scholar of Martin Luther King Jr., Terry said the Civil Rights leader’s views on the Vietnam War are echoed in the calls of activists today who are pressing to redistribute police resources.

“King thought that the idea of spending many orders of magnitude more for an unjust war than we did for the abolition of poverty and the abolition of ghettoization was a moral travesty, and it reflected a kind of sickness at the core of our society,” said Terry. “And part of what the defund model is based upon is a similar moral criticism, that these budgets reflect priorities that we have, and our priorities are broken.”

Terry also thinks the policing debate needs to be expanded to embrace a fuller understanding of what it means for people to feel truly safe in their communities. He highlights the work of sociologist Chris Muller and Harvard’s Robert Sampson, who have studied racial disparities in exposures to lead and the connections between a child’s early exposure to the toxic metal and antisocial behavior. Various studies have shown that lead exposure in children can contribute to cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, including heightened aggression.

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson,” said Terry, “but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work.”

Policing and criminal justice system

Alexandra Natapoff , Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism.

“Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.”

Unpacking such a complicated issue requires voices from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and fields of expertise who can shine light on the problem and possible solutions, said Natapoff, who co-founded a new lecture series with HLS Professor Andrew Crespo titled “ Policing in America .”

In recent weeks the pair have hosted Zoom discussions on topics ranging from qualified immunity to the Black Lives Matter movement to police unions to the broad contours of the American penal system. The series reflects the important work being done around the country, said Natapoff, and offers people the chance to further “engage in dialogue over these over these rich, complicated, controversial issues around race and policing, and governance and democracy.”

Courts and mass incarceration

Much of Natapoff’s recent work emphasizes the hidden dangers of the nation’s misdemeanor system. In her book “ Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal ,” Natapoff shows how the practice of stopping, arresting, and charging people with low-level offenses often sends them down a devastating path.

“This is how most people encounter the criminal apparatus, and it’s the first step of mass incarceration, the initial net that sweeps people of color disproportionately into the criminal system,” said Natapoff. “It is also the locus that overexposes Black people to police violence. The implications of this enormous net of police and prosecutorial authority around minor conduct is central to understanding many of the worst dysfunctions of our criminal system.”

One consequence is that Black and brown people are incarcerated at much higher rates than white people. America has approximately 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails, according to a 2020 report from the nonprofit the Prison Policy Initiative. According to a 2018 report from the Sentencing Project, Black men are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 3.1 times as likely.

Reducing mass incarceration requires shrinking the misdemeanor net “along all of its axes” said Natapoff, who supports a range of reforms including training police officers to both confront and arrest people less for low-level offenses, and the policies of forward-thinking prosecutors willing to “charge fewer of those offenses when police do make arrests.”

She praises the efforts of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins in Massachusetts and George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, Calif., who have pledged to stop prosecuting a range of misdemeanor crimes such as resisting arrest, loitering, trespassing, and drug possession. “If cities and towns across the country committed to that kind of reform, that would be a profoundly meaningful change,” said Natapoff, “and it would be a big step toward shrinking our entire criminal apparatus.”

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner cites the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

Sentencing reform

Another contributing factor in mass incarceration is sentencing disparities.

A recent Harvard Law School study found that, as is true nationally, people of color are “drastically overrepresented in Massachusetts state prisons.” But the report also noted that Black and Latinx people were less likely to have their cases resolved through pretrial probation ­— a way to dismiss charges if the accused meet certain conditions — and receive much longer sentences than their white counterparts.

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons. She points to the way the 1994 Crime Bill (legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware) ushered in much harsher drug penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. This tied the hands of judges issuing sentences and disproportionately punished people of color in the process. “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.”

The First Step Act, a bipartisan prison reform bill aimed at reducing racial disparities in drug sentencing and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, is just what its name implies, said Gertner.

“It reduces sentences to the merely inhumane rather than the grotesque. We still throw people in jail more than anybody else. We still resort to imprisonment, rather than thinking of other alternatives. We still resort to punishment rather than other models. None of that has really changed. I don’t deny the significance of somebody getting out of prison a year or two early, but no one should think that that’s reform.”

 Not just bad apples

Reform has long been a goal for federal leaders. Many heralded Obama-era changes aimed at eliminating racial disparities in policing and outlined in the report by The President’s Task Force on 21st Century policing. But HKS’s Smith saw them as largely symbolic. “It’s a nod to reform. But most of the reforms that are implemented in this country tend to be reforms that nibble around the edges and don’t really make much of a difference.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Smith, who cites studies suggesting a majority of Americans hold negative biases against Black and brown people, and that unconscious prejudices and stereotypes are difficult to erase.

“Experiments show that you can, in the context of a day, get people to think about race differently, and maybe even behave differently. But if you follow up, say, a week, or two weeks later, those effects are gone. We don’t know how to produce effects that are long-lasting. We invest huge amounts to implement such police reforms, but most often there’s no empirical evidence to support their efficacy.”

Even the early studies around the effectiveness of body cameras suggest the devices do little to change “officers’ patterns of behavior,” said Smith, though she cautions that researchers are still in the early stages of collecting and analyzing the data.

And though police body cameras have caught officers in unjust violence, much of the general public views the problem as anomalous.

“Despite what many people in low-income communities of color think about police officers, the broader society has a lot of respect for police and thinks if you just get rid of the bad apples, everything will be fine,” Smith added. “The problem, of course, is this is not just an issue of bad apples.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice Harvard Kennedy School.

Community-based ways forward

Still Smith sees reason for hope and possible ways forward involving a range of community-based approaches. As part of the effort to explore meaningful change, Smith, along with Christopher Winship , Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at HKS, have organized “ Reimagining Community Safety: A Program in Criminal Justice Speaker Series ” to better understand the perspectives of practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, activists, and academics engaged in public safety reform.

Some community-based safety models have yielded important results. Smith singles out the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program (known as CAHOOTS ) in Eugene, Ore., which supplements police with a community-based public safety program. When callers dial 911 they are often diverted to teams of workers trained in crisis resolution, mental health, and emergency medicine, who are better equipped to handle non-life-threatening situations. The numbers support her case. In 2017 the program received 25,000 calls, only 250 of which required police assistance. Training similar teams of specialists who don’t carry weapons to handle all traffic stops could go a long way toward ending violent police encounters, she said.

“Imagine you have those kinds of services in play,” said Smith, paired with community-based anti-violence program such as Cure Violence , which aims to stop violence in targeted neighborhoods by using approaches health experts take to control disease, such as identifying and treating individuals and changing social norms. Together, she said, these programs “could make a huge difference.”

At Harvard Law School, students have been  studying how an alternate 911-response team  might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

The forthcoming report, compiled by two students in the HLS clinic, Billy Roberts and Anna Vande Velde, will offer officials a range of ideas for how to think about community safety that builds on existing efforts in Boston and other cities, said Viscomi.

But Smith, like others, knows community-based interventions are only part of the solution. She applauds the Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of Brown. The 102-page report shed light on the department’s discriminatory policing practices, including the ways police disproportionately targeted Black residents for tickets and fines to help balance the city’s budget. To fix such entrenched problems, state governments need to rethink their spending priorities and tax systems so they can provide cities and towns the financial support they need to remain debt-free, said Smith.

Rethinking the 911-response system to being one that is “more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” is part of the student-led research under the direction of Law School Professor Rachel Viscomi, who heads up the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Jon Chase/Harvard file photo

“Part of the solution has to be a discussion about how government is funded and how a city like Ferguson got to a place where government had so few resources that they resorted to extortion of their residents, in particular residents of color, in order to make ends meet,” she said. “We’ve learned since that Ferguson is hardly the only municipality that has struggled with funding issues and sought to address them through the oppression and repression of their politically, socially, and economically marginalized Black and Latino residents.”

Police contracts, she said, also need to be reexamined. The daughter of a “union man,” Smith said she firmly supports officers’ rights to union representation to secure fair wages, health care, and safe working conditions. But the power unions hold to structure police contracts in ways that protect officers from being disciplined for “illegal and unethical behavior” needs to be challenged, she said.

“I think it’s incredibly important for individuals to be held accountable and for those institutions in which they are embedded to hold them to account. But we routinely find that union contracts buffer individual officers from having to be accountable. We see this at the level of the Supreme Court as well, whose rulings around qualified immunity have protected law enforcement from civil suits. That needs to change.”

Other Harvard experts agree. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe last June, Tomiko Brown-Nagin , dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, pointed out the Court’s “expansive interpretation of qualified immunity” and called for reform that would “promote accountability.”

“This nation is devoted to freedom, to combating racial discrimination, and to making government accountable to the people,” wrote Brown-Nagin. “Legislators today, like those who passed landmark Civil Rights legislation more than 50 years ago, must take a stand for equal justice under law. Shielding police misconduct offends our fundamental values and cannot be tolerated.”

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Building a diverse workforce in law enforcement

Successful recruitment in law enforcement today is possible but requires effort, experimentation and commitment to continuous improvement of approaches.

This is a once-in-a-generation chance to energize the profession toward renewed connection to and investment in the public good via embracing inclusivity.

AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 Police1 Leadership Briefing. To read the full briefing, see Rising homicide rates | Diverse workforces | Winning the opioid war , and add the Leadership Briefing to your subscriptions .

By Jane Wiseman

A worker shortage is sweeping the nation, and law enforcement is no exception. Across the country, law enforcement agencies struggle to recruit, hire and retain police officers for reasons that span social, economic and political factors. [1] Compounding the problem, in some departments, officers are retiring at a faster rate than they are being replaced.

The events following the murder of George Floyd made police hiring more complex as it exacerbated tension between the community and law enforcement and inflamed long-standing beliefs that racial biases exist within the profession. To help address these tensions, law enforcement leaders may want to diversify their organizations – but this is no easy task even before such recent events.

My team reviewed recent scholarly research for relevant insight and surfaced four recommendations (Note: the research was funded by the Massachusetts State Police/Executive Office of Public Safety and Security). [2]

1. Attract a greater volume of qualified candidates

Successful recruitment in law enforcement today is possible but requires effort, experimentation and commitment to continuous improvement of approaches.

In addition to expanding traditional pathways like internships and partnerships with criminal justice programs, departments can begin to look at nontraditional disciplines, such as foreign language programs, technology-centric schools, and hospitality or management programs that offer potential recruits with skills needed to better relations with communities, improve analytics and foster a culture of customer service.

2. Recruit more women and people of color

According to the Police Executive Research Forum , “trying to recruit and hire only candidates who have the same life experiences and outlooks as those currently in the profession is a recipe for failure.”

Successful recruiting of women and people of color can be achieved by:

• Creating targeted outreach programs to reach diverse audiences
• Using targeted digital marketing
• Ensuring prospective candidates can see themselves in the role
• Reviewing job postings and messaging for unintended language biases
• Providing support to applicants from diverse backgrounds
• Considering modifications to physical fitness requirements
• Screening out candidates who exhibit biases
• Assessing organizational culture for any barriers to belonging
• Strengthening policies that prohibit harassment.

3. Retain more candidates during the selection process

Law enforcement recruitment hiring processes can be lengthy and convoluted, forcing many good candidates to simply give up and take other jobs. Strategies to facilitate retention of more candidates during selection include:

• Designing a user-centric process
• One-on-one support via mentors or advisors
• Targeted support at steps of the application when candidates are most likely to drop out
• Coaching so candidates can pass fitness exams
• Streamlining steps and leveraging technology modernization to cut down hiring time
• Giving candidates visibility into their status in the hiring process.

4. Ease pressure on recruiting with less attrition and new staffing models

In most cases, retaining existing officers takes far fewer resources than identifying, screening, selecting and training new ones – and it takes the pressure off the recruiting function.

Research-based ways to reduce attrition include giving recruits a realistic job preview before they start, conducting exit interviews to understand and common reasons for leaving, and conducting “stay” interviews to understand key motivations for staff who stay employed.

For some agencies, rethinking deployment models may uncover creative ways to simultaneously improve morale and professionalism while decreasing churn. Scholars Whetstone, Reed and Turner suggest creating a training model akin to the one utilized in the medical field with a standard set of rotations among specialties to be completed in the first three years of service and then allowing staff to choose their specialty.

Finally, a careful review of tasks that can be automated or completed by using remote work options, along with examining roles that can be filled by contracted, part-time, non-sworn, or seasonal staff can modernize the approach to staffing, recruitment and retention within the law enforcement workforce.

A more diverse police force will take time, but incremental progress can gradually shift an organization with annual progress toward ambitious goals.

Diversity hiring goals should be clear and visibly supported by the chief, and accountability for reaching those goals should be vested in a respected senior leader. Partnership with key community stakeholders must be a key part of the strategy.

This is a once-in-a-generation chance to energize the profession toward renewed connection to and investment in the public good via embracing inclusivity and creating a more diverse team. Communities just may respond in kind with greater trust and confidence.

1. IACP. The state of recruitment: A crisis for law enforcement .

2. The full review of recent scholarly literature can be found here , and the policymaker summary can be found here .

NEXT: 5 takeaways for police recruiters from the ‘Who wants to be a cop?’ series

About the author

Jane Wiseman is the CEO of the Institute for Excellence in Government, a non-profit consulting firm dedicated to improving government performance. She is also an Innovations in Government Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. She has served as an appointed official in government and as a financial advisor and consultant to government. Her consulting, research and writing focus on government innovation and data-driven decision-making.

Diversity in law enforcement may improve policing, study shows

CHICAGO — In the last decade, high-profile police killings — including George Floyd in 2020 — have shaken the nation and led to widespread protests and calls for reform, including hiring more nonwhite and female officers.

But there was little research to back that up. Now, a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, suggests that diversity in law enforcement can indeed lead to improvements in how police treat people of color.

“It’s a system that very clearly needs reforming,” said University of Pennsylvania data scientist Dean Knox, a co-author of the study. “We just haven’t had good data on what reforms work.”

News Latino officers are helping diversify police. Can they help reform the ranks?

For the paper, Knox and his colleagues analyzed data on nearly 3 million Chicago Police Department patrol assignments. They found that compared to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers made far fewer stops and arrests — and used force less often — especially against Black civilians. They also found female officers used less force than their male counterparts.

“This is the best evidence to date” that officer demographics have an influence on policing, said Harvard sociologist Joscha Legewie, who was not involved in the study. “It’s an old question, and one that’s really hard to answer.”

Researchers spent three years fighting for detailed data from Chicago Police, and appealed some of their requests all the way up to the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.

“It’s a difficult, difficult thing to pull together these data sources,” said Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and a former Tennessee police officer who was not involved in the study. “This is the kind of research we really need.”

News Police killings of Latinos lack attention, say activists

Eventually, the team amassed data on 1.6 million enforcements — such as stops and arrests — by nearly 7,000 officers from 2012 to 2015.

By comparing officers working in similar areas, researchers noticed a difference across demographics. Relative to white officers on the same assignments in the same neighborhoods, Black officers were less likely to stop, arrest, and use force against civilians.

Over the course of 100 shifts, Black officers made, on average, about 16 fewer stops and two fewer arrests — a 20% to 30% reduction compared to white officers in comparable scenarios.

“We see two groups of officers going out, and they’re treating the same group of civilians differently,” Knox said. “It’s troubling.”

This disparity was most pronounced in majority-Black neighborhoods, researchers found, and was predominantly focused on minor crimes and not violent offenses.

Most officers respond the same way to violent crimes such as armed robbery or assault. With minor infractions, though, like traffic violations or drug possession, Legewie said, “There’s more leeway for the officer to make a decision.”

And in recent years, police response to minor infractions have set off many protests against police brutality — including the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago.

“It can escalate,” said co-author and Princeton University political scientist Jonathan Mummolo. “These can have extreme consequences.”

The new study has its limitations.

Since the data was collected from 2012 to 2015, it doesn’t capture recent changes to policing in Chicago. The paper also doesn’t account for the department’s internal culture, which influences how recruits behave in the field.

And, as a case study of Chicago, the paper is not automatically generalizable to the country’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies, especially suburban and rural ones.

Still, the findings support what local community activists have argued for decades.

“That’s what we expect,” said Regina Russell, co-chair at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. “That’s why we’ve been pushing for this for years.”

Russell grew up in a predominantly Black area of Chicago, but said the police officers who patrolled her neighborhood were largely white — “Never anyone who looked like us.”

Chicago has long been plagued by tensions between police and residents, roughly half of whom are nonwhite.

Local activists have long called for diversity to reduce the harm of a “racially oppressive police department,” said Simon Balto, who researches history and African American studies at the University of Iowa.

During the early 1960s, Balto said, internal initiatives to increase recruitment helped diversify the Chicago Police Department — an effort further bolstered by a 1973 discrimination suit filed by the city’s Afro-American Patrolmen’s League. “By the ’70s, the CPD wasn’t some beacon of diversity or even representative of the city’s demographics,” Balto said, “but it made strides for the first time in history.”

Today, about half of Chicago Police Department officers are people of color and more than one-fifth are women.

Russell said it was exciting to watch this demographic shift happen in real-time. However, she said, “Just increasing diversity isn’t going to fix this.”

She and other local activists want to see more body cameras, community oversight of police, stringent use of force policies and more consequences for police officers who do harm while on the job.

Others, like Erika Maye, a senior leader for the nonprofit civil rights organization Color of Change, say pushes for diversity are a misstep. “They don’t go deep enough or tackle the root issues,” she said. “Police violence is not an issue of representation.”

Instead, Color of Change advocates for cities to divest from policing and invest in health care, education and job training. “To really protect Black lives, we feel we really need to upend the current policing system,” Maye said.

Maye, Russell and Balto said they hope for future research on other reform proposals that center on systemic change, such as initiatives to reduce the size and scope of police departments and reallocate those resources to create crisis intervention teams and other community-based programs.

Mummolo agreed. “We have a lot of policies that were adopted based on hunches or intuitions,” he said.

Data on fatal police encounters, body camera use, civilian complaints and officer political affiliation, for example, could be the focus of future studies.

“This (study) lays out a roadmap for other researchers,” said co-author and Columbia University economist Roman Rivera.

Follow NBC Latino on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .

The Associated Press

Diversity in Law Enforcement Through Diverse Lenses Essay

The natural and applied sciences lens, the lens of the social sciences.

The issue of diversity in law enforcement is essential and relevant in the modern world. This issue can be analyzed through the lens of the natural and applied sciences because police officers are usually hired based on their physical appearance and health condition. Although it may seem that judging a person by their physical status is discrimination against that person, physical qualifications are crucial for police officers.

Police departments impose strict physical features on those who want to serve in law enforcement. Thus, from the perspective of the natural sciences, height and weight ratio, as well as vision and hearing qualifications, flexibility, and other health conditions, are of high importance for the effective performance of police workers. According to Evans (2018), a police department may require a person to stand 5 feet, 7 inches tall and “weigh at least 140 pounds but no more than 180 pounds” (para. 7). Frequently, such demands differ for men and women, and physical requirements for opposite sexes will also be diverse.

However, women are usually disproportionally disadvantaged by physical test requirements. Nowadays, most of these tests are based on upper body strength, thus supporting men (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019, p. 16). Female officers argue that many of these physical qualifications are not needed for performing their job. For example, one woman officer said, “I’ve made more than 1,000 arrests and not once did I have to do 24 push-ups before putting handcuffs on someone. I’ve never run a mile and a half after a suspect” (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019, p. 16). One can see that natural sciences may help change the existing physical exams, adapting them to men and women to reflect physical differences more accurately.

The applied sciences can also help comment on the current issue of law enforcement diversity. Thus, the statistics show that in 2019, only 12.8 percent of full-time police officers were women, while 87.2 percent were men (Duffin, 2020, para. 1). Quantitative research helps better comprehend the situation of gender and racial divide in law enforcement. Moreover, technological advancements can also be utilized in police to reduce the workload of officers and attract more workers into law enforcement (Harrar et al., 2021, para. 10). Online communities can be used to gather complaints, thus decreasing the amount of office work and enabling police officers to work on real cases (Wall & Williams, 2007, p. 402). One can see that the applied sciences may have a positive impact on law enforcement diversity, controlling statistics and reducing the workload in police departments.

The social sciences deal with the relationships between people and society. Law enforcement diversity is directly interrelated with the social sciences and impacts such social issues as public safety and security. Thus, female officers better interact with offenders and victims, are less likely to use physical force, and create a positive image of a police department for the community (Fritsvold, 2021, para. 7). In addition, women tend to report sexual assault and domestic violence to a woman officer rather than a man (Newman, 2018, para. 1). Research showed that many women fail to report sexual harassment to male officers because of the fear of being judged, as well as the lack of assurance that their claims will remain confidential (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019, p. 25). When the number of female officers in a particular district increases, the percentage of crime reported by female assault victims rises respectively (Newman, 2018, para. 3). Consequently, police departments and society will benefit if more women work as police officers.

At the same time, the lens of the social sciences helps better understand why women and racial minorities often refuse to work in law enforcement. First, women are often told that they will be fired if they get pregnant. Society should not accept such norms because pregnancy is a natural part of life, and one should not lose a job because of it. Moreover, women are often perceived as weak and unable to express power and rudeness to offenders (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019, p. 21). Sexual and verbal harassment at work are other reasons why women feel uncomfortable while joining law enforcement. From the perspective of racial minorities, white police officers are more likely to stop black people on the street just because they look suspicious than their black colleagues (Desilver et al., 2020, para. 3). All these factors demonstrate that women and racial minorities perceive law enforcement negatively, which leads to their refusal to apply for a job there. Understanding these issues may help change the current situation and diversify the police forces in the future.

Having analyzed the issue of law enforcement diversity, one can conclude that society and social relations play an important role in a diversifying process. On the one hand, positive social experiences may attract women and ethnic minorities to the police department. On the other hand, if social experiences are negative, these groups will turn away from the perspective of working as police officers.

Desilver, D., Lipka, M., & Fahmy, D. (2020). 10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S . Pew Research Center. Web.

Duffin, E. (2020). Gender distribution of full-time U.S. law enforcement employees 2019. Statista. Web.

Evans, M. (2018). Physical qualifications to be a police officer . Career Trend. Web.

Fritsvold, E. (2021). We need more women working in law enforcement. Here’s why . The University of San Diego. Web.

Harrar, P., Sandhu, P., Odle, P., Jarman, R., Mahil, M., & Coaten, N. (2021). Delivering diversity and inclusion in policing. TechUK. Web.

Newman, C. (2018). Study: Hiring female police officers helps women report violence and sexual assault. UVA Today. Web.

U.S. Department of Justice. (2019). National institute of justice special report: Women in policing: breaking barriers and blazing a path. Web.

Wall, D. S., & Williams, M. (2007). Policing diversity in the digital age: Maintaining order in virtual communities. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 7 (4), 391-415. Web.

• Online Harassment and Its Impact on Victims
• Sexual Assault and Harassment: Synthesis of Literature
• Sexual Harassment and Culture
• Federal Judges: Recruitment and Appointment of Judges
• Death Case Insanity: Application of a Treatment to a Convict
• Defunding the Police: What Does It Mean?
• Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. Case
• Probation/Parole Excessive Caseloads, Proper Supervision and Prison Re-Entry Programs
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, November 24). Diversity in Law Enforcement Through Diverse Lenses. https://ivypanda.com/essays/diversity-in-law-enforcement-through-diverse-lenses/

"Diversity in Law Enforcement Through Diverse Lenses." IvyPanda , 24 Nov. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/diversity-in-law-enforcement-through-diverse-lenses/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Diversity in Law Enforcement Through Diverse Lenses'. 24 November.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Diversity in Law Enforcement Through Diverse Lenses." November 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/diversity-in-law-enforcement-through-diverse-lenses/.

1. IvyPanda . "Diversity in Law Enforcement Through Diverse Lenses." November 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/diversity-in-law-enforcement-through-diverse-lenses/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Diversity in Law Enforcement Through Diverse Lenses." November 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/diversity-in-law-enforcement-through-diverse-lenses/.

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Police Officers Explain Why Diversity in Law Enforcement Matters

By Brianna Flavin on 12/10/2018

Conversations about diversity carry a lot of weight in any industry. But when it comes to law enforcement, this critical topic can get swept into a confusing tangle of headlines, laws and politics.

But law enforcement officers are often the first people to see the value in diverse hiring choices. On the force, your partner or your team could be the difference between life and death, solving the crime or not solving it. And as much confidence you might have in your own wits and abilities—you don’t want all the officers out there to think like you. The more skills, perspectives and insights a police department can apply to the job—the better!

“People from different cultures and backgrounds have different demeanors and ways of carrying themselves,” says Major Albert Guerra of the Miami Police Department . “Diversity in the Force ensures that we are prepared for these cultural differences and help us avoid unfortunate misunderstandings.”

Most people don’t exactly think of law enforcement as a “people-person” career choice—but the job is exactly that. Officers spend tons of time interacting with people. Whether it’s their team, their suspects or general members of the public, law enforcement professionals need communication skills for a far greater number of populations and occasions than your average citizen. As our experts are quick to point out—navigating that can often be a matter of diversity in law enforcement.

Wondering what diversity really adds to the force? Read on to hear what law enforcement professionals say.

Communicating with cultural nuance

If you’ve spent most of your time in one culture, it’s hard to recognize the many different ways people communicate in body language and subtle conversational cues. If you were to suddenly step into a foreign culture, you’d realize in a hurry that people don’t exactly say what they mean. There’s a lot going on under the surface.

This can be a dangerous place of confusion when it comes to law enforcement. If you are an officer approaching an unknown and potentially fraught situation, and people are behaving in unexpected ways—it’s hard to know what to do. It’s not just the extreme scenarios where this helps, either—a diverse police unit can help make everyday police work more comfortable.

“For instance, in Miami, we have a large Latin population,” Guerra says. “Latin people sometimes speak to each other in close proximity that would make someone of a different culture uncomfortable.” Guerra goes on to say that officers who come from Latin cultures themselves pave the way for more effective work in those communities. “By encouraging diversity, we also enable better relationships with members of the community.”

Adding to diversity training

Many police departments require diversity training on some level. It isn’t safe for officers or civilians to leave room for serious assumption-based misunderstandings. But just trying to avoid danger or criticism is a different motivation from truly celebrating the benefits that diversity can bring.

Commander Freddie Cruz II of the City of Miami Police Department says diversity training is required in Miami so officers can learn about all the cultures they will interact with on the job. But Cruz advises students and prospective officers to go a step farther.

“In Miami, we really celebrate diversity. Anyone considering a career in law enforcement should consider studying different social and ethnic groups to add to the firsthand experiences in their different cultures."

On top of bolstering your understanding of different perspectives, you might also glean important insights into what makes people tick.

Earning public trust

When a police department is trusted by its community, the job works like it should. But trust can be a very hard thing to earn in law enforcement—especially since officers tend to appear in a citizen’s life when something has gone wrong. Paul Grattan, a sergeant at a large metropolitan police agency, says having police officers who represent a wide range of experiences, ethnicities, religious backgrounds and more means citizens will see officers who look like them.

“My experience has been that citizens are more naturally inclined to trust and open up to people with whom they share something—whether they go to the same church, listen to the same music or have similar family backgrounds,” Grattan says.

“Police agencies that are rich in diversity are simply more likely to garner individual trust among a group of citizens because the agency is reflective of the community and is inclusive of officers of many backgrounds and experiences.”

This matters for more than just general public perception. When people trust you as a police officer, they enable you to do your job and get to the bottom of problems faster. “The tenet that ‘people like to talk to people like themselves’ is true,” says Mark Anderson, director of training and development for Anderson Investigative Associates . “We cannot be all things to all people, but having a representation of all people allows us to more effectively serve and gain the information necessary to fulfill our mission.”

Maximizing interviews and solving crimes faster

Law enforcement professionals need to be able to nurture trust and encourage everyone they work with to be as cooperative as possible. Think of situations where officers are interviewing people connected to a case—the information they gather can make all the difference in the world.

“I used to think I was the best person for each interview, but really, this is not true,” Anderson says. No matter how well you know your stuff—people with different backgrounds, experiences and personalities than yours will be the better choice depending on the interview. “This diversity also helps in planning, preparation and execution for greater success. I understand what I understand well, but that’s certainly not everything.”

When Anderson teaches classes on training and preparation for interviews, he highlights “The need to seek the best team or individual to aid in relationship- and rapport-building and ultimately maximize the amount of truthful information obtained.”

Understanding the people we work with

There can be so many barriers to understanding someone—especially when tensions are high and everyone is on their guard. You can arrest someone without understanding them, but you can’t address larger problems or investigate recurrent issues without a glimpse into motives.

“Nothing is more diverse than they body of people you speak to in the interviewing arena—who they are, what they have done, their reasons and rationale—it is amazing,” Andersons says. “If this interview is coming after a significant investigation you should be keenly attuned to the violation, the players, the possible crimes, the modus operandi—but I also challenge my students to consistently observe the soft issues.”

These soft issues are the interrelationship of the actors, the personalities of everyone involved, what they value, who they associate with, etc., according to Anderson. “The more I have researched and understood the interviewee, who they are and what their biases are, the more able I am going to be to find commonality with them—that’s when they will tell me the truth. Diversity of personnel and experience can become so valuable to assist this transition.”

Changing the perception of what a police officer should look like

Close your eyes and picture a police officer for a moment. What do you see? What is this person like? The stereotypes and depictions of professionals in law enforcement just don’t cover the spectrum of personalities and skills you’ll find in a police department.

“My agency works hard to shatter misconceptions that a police officer needs to fit a certain mold in talent or ability—particularly during recruitment,” Grattan says. Grattan explains that diversity in skill sets, family circumstances, training and education, prior work experience, language proficiencies, cultural exposure, family history, hobbies, talents, volunteerism and military service is all so necessary in a group of police officers.

“This helps us understand that being a police officer may be right for someone in spite of preconceived notions about what a cop is,” Grattan says. “Officers who bring diverse experience to the table only increase our collective ability to solve problems.”

Do you see yourself in law enforcement?

Diversity in law enforcement helps us understand that all kinds of people are needed in this job. If your image of a police officer involves a certain kind of person or a certain personality type—consider how someone different would be really essential to balance the demands of the job.

Besides, the best skills and traits to have as a police officer aren’t always what people typically expect. Check out our article, “ 8 Often Overlooked Qualities You Need to Be a Great Police Officer ,” to see what really matters on the job.

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University of Virginia School of Law

Hail to the Class of 2024

Graduating students Priya Kareddy, Julia Jean “JJ” Citron, Andre Earls, Daniel McCray, Kate Granruth, Haley Gorman, Casey Schmidt, Dennis Ting, Sumit Kapur, Grace Allaman, Sean Onwualu and Rachel Lia pose for photos in April. Photo by Julia Davis

Graduates and their guests will gather Sunday for commencement at the University of Virginia and the School of Law. As the community prepares for the celebration, read more about the Class of 2024 and their achievements in the stories below.

• Class of 2024 Graduation Ceremony Details
• Watch the UVA Final Exercises Livestream (9 a.m. ET)
• Watch the Law School Livestream (12:15 p.m. ET or view weather plan details )
• Meet Commencement Speaker Dasha Smith ’98

Graduate Profiles and Career Accolades

Camano Capitalized on Multiple Abilities Despite facing physical and health challenges from a significant congenital condition, Joseph Camano juggled academics, sports and music.

From the Lagoon to the Libel Show to Law Grad James Hornsby directed the school’s comedy sketch show and was involved in a host of other student activities.

Following a Dream Once Deferred, Leonard To Join Marine Judge Advocates Meet Lauren Leonard, vice president of Older Wiser Law Students and a future Marine judge advocate lawyer, who chased two deferred dreams at once at UVA Law.

23rd Powell Fellow To Address Housing Disputes Michael Pruitt will provide legal support to public benefits recipients as the 23rd Powell Fellow in Legal Services.

Zipperer Wins School’s First Immigrant Justice Corps Fellowship Grace Zipperer will serve as an Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow at the Empire Justice Center in New York.

10 Students in the Class of 2024 Will Take on Roles in the Federal Government Ten students in the Class of 2024 have obtained positions with the federal government after graduation.

JAG Officers Enhance Legal Education With UVA LL.M. Degrees Already equipped with their J.D.s, five military lawyers furthered their legal education by earning master’s degrees.

Leaders and Award-Winners

Crowley, Hernandez Tragesser Receive Rosenbloom Award Casey Crowley and Sophia Hernandez Tragesser received the Law School’s 2024 Rosenbloom Award, which honors students with a strong academic record who have significantly enhanced the academic experience of their peers.

41st Annual Softball Tournament Brings Home Record $40,000 for Charity Andrew Becker ’24 was this year’s NGSL commissioner, and Sally Levin and Grace Stevens were tournament directors.

Hudson Wins Swanson Award Keegan Hudson was this year’s recipient of the Gregory H. Swanson Award, named in honor of the first Black student to attend UVA and the Law School.

Citron, Hornsby, Hudson and Putfark Named Ritter Scholars Julia Jean “JJ” Citron, James Hornsby, Keegan Hudson and Elizabeth Putfark were named the 2023-24 Ritter Scholars.

UVA Law Tax Moot Court Team Finishes Fourth Kathryn Kenny, Kathryn Peters and Riley Ries were part of this year’s International and European Tax Moot Court competition.

Jessup Moot Court Team Competes in International Rounds Daniel Elliott was part of the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition team, which advanced to the international rounds.

Singsank Clinches Pickleball Title for UVA Lauralei Singsank scored the winning shot for UVA at the pickleball collegiate national championship.

Gray, Maliyekkal Win 95th Lile Moot Court Competition Sean Gray and Aquila Maliyekkal won the 95th William Minor Lile Moot Court Competition.

Adams Named Tillman Scholar Tyler Adams, a U.S. Army veteran, was named a 2023 Tillman Scholar.

Ahmad Named Inaugural Women’s Health Summer Fellow Salwa Ahmad worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the Law School’s inaugural Women’s Health Summer Fellow.

Hamilton Wins UVA Oratory Competition Peter Lee Hamilton won UVA’s third annual student oratory competition.

Flanagan Wins Notre Dame Writing Competition Caitlin Flanagan won third place in Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State & Society annual writing competition.

Cerja Leads Student Bar Association Tommy Cerja IV served as president of the Student Bar Association.

Assefa Leads Virginia Law Review Biruktawit “Birdy” Assefa served as editor-in-chief of the Virginia Law Review.

Gorman Honored for Highest GPA Haley Gorman won the Carl M. Franklin Prize for earning the highest GPA after two semesters and the Jackson Walker LLP Award for the highest GPA after four semesters.

Star Witnesses – Q&As With Students

Clark Builds Relationships as Therapist, Student Ambassador Kirsten Clark, a former therapist, discussed how therapy and lawyering skills intersect, and what she enjoys about representing the school as an ambassador.

Deering Grows His Portfolio Tristan Deering explained how his international business experience drew him to corporate and tax law.

Heck on the ‘Appeal’ of Law School Hunter Heck discussed her path to law school and how she prepared for the William Minor Lile Moot Court competition.

Kijewski Bridges Generations Jordan Kijewski talked about volunteering with Madison House and working for AmeriCorps before coming to law school.

Experiences Drive Mato To Help Others Sabrina Mato explored her interest in immigration law and her interest in building bridges among student communities.

Mercado Violand Advises Governor As he was starting his law student career, Fernando Mercado Violand was appointed to the Virginia Council on Environmental Justice.

Onwualu Trades in Playbooks for Casebooks Sean Onwualu, a former Syracuse football player and sports agency extern, discussed his most interesting classes and meeting Justice Stephen Breyer.

Sharma Tackles Sovereign Debt Law Rishabh Sharma, a former math teacher and wrestling coach, said he enjoyed studying international debt law at UVA Law while also working toward a master’s in education policy.

Experiencing the Law

Gray, McNerney Win Appeal at Sixth Circuit Sean Gray and Lauren McNerney recently won their case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit through the Appellate Litigation Clinic.

Ahmad, Hallisey Explore Health Care Issues in Kenya Students — including Salwa Ahmad and Sydney Hallisey — traveled to Kenya for their annual research trip over winter break, spending seven days learning about health care rights and related issues in the East African nation.

Hild, Pritchard Win on Appeal for Ukrainian Client Harry Hild and Meg Pritchard succeeded in a federal court appeal, allowing their client to remain in the U.S. after facing deportation to Ukraine.

Students Report on Transformative UN Trip Students in the International Human Rights Law Clinic — Maya Artis, Camille Blum, Nora Logsdon and Jina Shin — traveled to the U.N. headquarters in New York for a unique learning experience.

Students Teach Business Law Classes to Incarcerated Eight students — including Io Jones, Sumit Kapur, Katherine Poppiti and Liam Zeya — participated in a pilot program teaching business law classes to incarcerated people.

Ferguson, Hachten Help Pass Mental Health Reforms Michael Ferguson and Clare Hachten of the State and Local Government Policy Clinic worked with state Sen. Creigh Deeds on bills to reform temporary detention orders, or TDOs, which allow courts to direct a law enforcement officer to take an at-risk person into custody and transport them to a specified facility for mental health treatment.

Zipperer, Human Rights Project Studies Argentina’s Post-Dirty War Justice Eight students, including Grace Zipperer, traveled to Argentina to learn about human rights initiatives in Latin America in the aftermath of a Dirty War and military dictatorship.

Ahmad, Surgil Witness Tense Dialogue at OAS General Assembly Students in the International Human Rights Law Clinic attended the Organization of American States’ 52nd General Assembly in Lima, Peru, in October. The students — including Salwa Ahmad and Sabrina Surgil — recounted some of what they experienced there.

Ratliff, Stein Practice To Be Lawyers In this photo essay, William “Trey” Ratliff and Elizah Stein competed in first-year oral arguments.

When They Were First-Years

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-senate-has-confirmed-200-federal-judges-under-the-biden-administration

The Senate has confirmed 200 federal judges under the Biden administration

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate on Wednesday confirmed the 200th federal judge of President Joe Biden’s tenure, about a month earlier than when Donald Trump hit that mark in his term, though Trump still holds the edge when it comes to the most impactful confirmations — those to the Supreme Court and the country’s 13 appellate courts.

WATCH: Examining President Biden’s pledge to diversify the federal judiciary

The march to 200 culminated with the confirmation of Angela Martinez as a district court judge in Arizona. The milestone reflects the importance that Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., placed on judicial confirmations after Trump put his enormous stamp on the federal judiciary with the confirmation of three Supreme Court justices.

“Reaching 200 judges is a major milestone,” Schumer said just before the 66-28 vote. “Simply put, our 200 judges comprise the most diverse slate of judicial nominations under any president in American history.”

The current pace of judicial confirmations for this White House came despite Biden, a Democrat, coming into office in 2021 with far fewer vacancies, particularly in the influential appellate courts, than Trump, a Republican, did in 2017.

It’s unclear whether Biden can eclipse his predecessor’s 234 judges before the year ends.

Democrats have solidly backed the president’s judicial nominees, but there have been some cracks in that resolve in recent weeks. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he would not support nominees who do not have some bipartisan support, and the two Democratic senators from Nevada are opposing a nominee who would become the nation’s first Muslim appellate court judge . They did so after some law enforcement groups came out against the nomination.

WATCH: First Muslim American nominated to federal appeals court faces roadblocks in Senate

The White House is aware of the obstacles as they rush to surpass Trump’s accomplishment. It’s a high water mark that remains a point of pride for the former president and senior Republicans who made it happen, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Filling dozens of judicial vacancies requires time on the Senate floor calendar, which becomes more scarce as senators in the narrowly divided chamber shift into election-year campaign mode.

Of the more than 40 current judicial vacancies nationwide, half are in states with two Republican senators. That matters because for district court judges, home-state senators still can exercise virtual veto power over a White House’s nominations due to a long-standing Senate tradition.

White House officials say they have no illusions about the challenges they face but feel reaching 235 is possible. That doesn’t please Republicans.

“Unfortunately, they learned from our example about prioritizing lifetime appointments,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. Meanwhile, liberal advocacy groups are thrilled with the results so far.

“I just cannot rave enough about these judges,” said Jake Faleschini, who leads nominations work at the Alliance for Justice. “It’s been nothing short of transformative of the federal judiciary in terms of both excellence, but also demographic and professional diversity.”

At this stage in his term, Trump had two Supreme Court justices and 51 appellate court judges confirmed to lifetime appointments. Biden has tapped one Supreme Court justice and 42 appellate court judges. Biden has more confirmations of the district judges who handle civil and criminal cases. Those nominations tend to be less hard fought.

Biden has emphasized adding more female and minority judges to the federal bench. On that front, 127 of the 200 judges confirmed to the bench are women. Fifty-eight are Black and 36 are Hispanic, according to Schumer’s office. Thirty-five judges are Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, more than any other administration, according to the White House.

READ MORE: Biden outpaces predecessors with diverse judicial nominees

In the appellate courts, 30 of the 42 circuit judges confirmed during Biden’s term are women, according to the White House. Thirteen Black women have been chosen as circuit judges, more than all previous administrations combined.

Under Biden, more Hispanic judges have been confirmed to the appellate courts than any other administration.

As abortion access remains a vital priority for the Biden administration and a key argument for the president’s reelection bid, the White House also points to several judges with backgrounds on the issue. They include Judge Julie Rikelman of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who before her nomination argued on behalf of the abortion clinic in Dobbs vs Jackson, the 2022 ruling that dismantled Roe vs. Wade; and Nicole Berner, a former attorney at Planned Parenthood who now serves on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Conservatives say it is fine to have diversity, but that should not be the focus.

“I think the right standard isn’t trying to check boxes with nominees, but to try to find the men and women who are going to be faithful to the Constitution and the rule of law,” said Carrie Severino, president of JCN, a conservative group that worked to boost support for Trump’s nominees .

About a one-quarter of the judges Trump nominated were women and about 1 in 6 were minorities, according to the Pew Research Center.

Asked about the diversity of Biden’s nominees, GOP senators said there was too much focus on identity politics.

“I’m interested in competent lawyers who will administer justice fairly. Now, there are women that can do that. There are men that can do that. There are people of color that can do that,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “But their primary characteristic that they’re proudest of is racial identify or gender identity, and activist. And I just don’t think that’s what the American people want to see in their justice system.”

Proponents of diversifying the federal judiciary counter that people who come before the court have more trust in the legal process when they see people who look like them. They said it’s important to diversify the professional backgrounds of judges, too, so that more public defenders and those with a civil rights or non-profit background are considered.

“The American people deserve federal judges who not only look like America, but understand the American experience from every angle,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman.

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Senator Wiener Introduces SB 271 to Allow for More Diverse and Democratic Sheriff Elections

SACRAMENTO – Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has introduced SB 271, the Sheriff Democracy and Diversity Act, to allow all registered voters to run for Sheriff — reverting back to the eligibility requirements in place from 1850 until 1989. Currently, only law enforcement officers — people with POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) certificates — are eligible to run for Sheriff. Because only a tiny pool of people is eligible to run, Sheriffs are effectively insulated from political accountability and are only accountable to the law enforcement officers who are authorized to challenge their reelection. As a result, various Sheriffs have aggressively cooperated with ICE to facilitate deportations, have ignored and refused to endorse COVID public health orders, and have failed to be responsive to community demands for police and jail reform. Moreover, most Sheriffs — among the most powerful elected positions in the state — run for reelection unopposed, and 49 out of the 58 California Sheriffs are white men.

From 1850 until 1989, California law allowed any registered voter to run for Sheriff in their county. In 1989, after intense pressure from the Sheriffs Association, the law was changed in reaction to a non-law enforcement officer being elected Sheriff in San Francisco.

With the racial justice uprising this summer in response to police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and with the long overdue focus on mass incarceration and unsafe prison conditions, there is increasing consensus in favor of a dramatic reimagining of policing and our criminal justice system. Current state law regarding Sheriff eligibility requirements, however, makes it challenging to move towards police and criminal justice reform, given the narrow pool of candidates eligible to run. Various Sheriffs in California do not act in the best interest of constituents on a number of issues: some cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) despite California’s sanctuary state status; some have refused to enforce health orders while California’s COVID-19 death and hospitalization numbers rose; and some Sheriffs’ departments treated protestors with unnecessary force this summer during the uprising.

California operated for 139 years without the additional requirement that Sheriff candidates have a POST certificate. If we want to see dramatic and important racial justice and immigrant justice measures implemented and our criminal justice system changed, we must diversify and democratize who can run for Sheriff. Voters should be able to elect a candidate who represents their values and who has the training and skills necessary to change our criminal justice system and prioritize mental health training and de-escalation rather than force.

SB 271 will restore long-standing eligibility requirements that will make California Sheriff elections more democratic and diverse. The legislation is sponsored by the California Immigrant Policy Center (CPIC), NextGen California, Secure Justice and Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club.

“It’s time we prioritize democracy and diversity in our Sheriff elections,” said Senator Scott Wiener. “Anyone who wants to run for Sheriff and is qualified should run, and voters can democratically elect whomever they believe is the best candidate. We need Sheriffs who actually represent the beliefs and values of their constituents. California must reimagine its criminal justice system, and to do that, we will need a more diverse pool of Sheriff candidates who are committed to this project.”

"For far too long county Sheriff’s departments have failed to faithfully implement meaningful reforms that center the very communities they are meant to protect and serve,” said Ken Spence, Senior Policy Advisor at NextGen California. “Expanding the pool of candidates to include community leaders and qualified experts will broaden the range of perspectives and skills Sheriffs bring to the office, such as invaluable backgrounds in mental health care and trauma-informed approaches. This reform has the potential to fundamentally change the way the public experiences policing in our state. Therefore, NextGen California is proud to support The Sheriff Democracy and Diversity Act and thanks Senator Wiener for championing this key legislation."

"The California Immigrant Policy Center is proud to partner with Senator Wiener to co-sponsor The Sheriff Democracy and Diversity Act, an initiative to remove the exclusionary law enforcement requirement for county sheriffs," said Orville Thomas, CIPC's Director of Government Affairs. "We continue to see how sheriffs impact California, ignoring concerned efforts at oversight and transparency because they traditionally don't see viable challengers at the ballot box. The result is local law enforcement offices sidestep California law while continuing to remain entrenched in the racist criminal legal system and the federal deportation machine. This effort to return California back to open sheriff elections opens the office to a diversity of candidates and a different vision for the criminal-legal system."

“In Alameda County, our Sheriff cooperates with ICE and oversees a jail notorious for in-custody deaths and inhumane conditions,” said Judith Stacey, chair of the Sheriff Reform Project at the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club. “Yet under the law enforcement criteria enacted in 1988, we could find no eligible candidates sensitive to the needs of our Black, Brown, poor and immigrant neighbors. After the racial justice uprisings last summer, local activists realized that the time is right for real public safety reform. We need the Sheriff Democracy and Diversity Act to expand the pool and reimagine the mission of county Sheriffs in California.”

"At present, most Sheriffs in California are white males, which does not reflect the diverse population of our state,” said Brian Hofer, Executive Director of Secure Justice. “Today, Sheriffs are essentially managers of a large bureaucracy, overseeing civilian, unarmed employees that carry out most of the duties of the office of Sheriff. Candidates for the office should not be restricted solely to those with law enforcement experience, as other skill sets are needed as we move some functions away from armed officers. Senator Wiener's Sheriff Democracy and Diversity Act will allow for a broader pool of candidates to seek one of the most important offices in our state, the role of county Sheriff.”

Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast draws 1,000, honors struggle for LGBT equality

Close to 1,000 guests, including 275 wide-eyed, enthusiastic students, came together for the Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast on May 9 at the Palm Springs Convention Center to honor Milk's legacy and his struggle to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality.

The event also served to strengthen the partnerships of area organizations with that same goal. Stuart Milk, co-founder and executive chair of the Harvey Milk Foundation, was presented with the Global Activist Award. News anchor Peter Daut, black and LGBTQ historian/author Zaylore Stout, songstress Keisha D, DJ Galaxy, community advocate Scott Nevins and entertainer Matthew Hocutt all played a role in creating this transformative celebration.

Ron deHarte, Breakfast Coalition founder and president of Greater Palm Springs Pride, said: "Here, we're uniting supporters of equality and justice. It was Harvey's courageous work to end discrimination in the '70s that set the stage for many of the civil rights advances of today."

The event also shines a light on local youth. Students participate by writing essays about Harvey Milk. Others are invited to speak.

"They feel empowered, mingling with city officials, educators, law enforcement, media and local businesses in an affirming environment," deHarte said. "Everyone feels the impact of our next generation of leaders."

Safe Schools Desert Cities works with Gay Straight Alliances (GSAs) at more than 20 middle and high schools. They handle the logistics of getting the students to the breakfast.

"With so many youths in attendance, the LGBTQ adults can't help but be moved," said Safe Schools President Eric Ornelas. "Most were in grade school long before anything like this existed. They had no one to turn to for advice, no 'out' role models to look up to. Now, they're seeing the progress firsthand.

"These students, with their bravery and intelligence, give me so much hope for our future."

Honoree Stuart Milk is an LGBTQ rights advocate who's worked with struggling and emerging LGBTQ communities in more than 60 countries. He's also the nephew of the late Harvey Milk.

In a conversation prior to the breakfast, Stuart spoke about the need for unity. "Minority groups are the enemy of communities that want to take away our rights and separate us. We're always subject to the majority's tyranny," he said. "As my uncle emphatically stated, 'You may not be on their shopping list today, but you'll definitely be on their shopping list.' That's why it's critical that we understand each other's struggles and ask, 'How can we provide support within the LGBTQ community?'"

Stuart also provided a global perspective. "We have countries that are going backwards, re-criminalizing homosexuality and enforcing draconian laws. Most people still live in places where it's illegal or socially unacceptable to be LGBTQ. And our own LGBTQ youth in this country are five times more likely to be homeless. So, the battle never ends."

At the breakfast, Monika Ujkic from Shadow Hills High School in Indio was honored as this year's Outstanding GSA Advisor. Ujkic thinks it's important for schools to have a visible GSAs, so "students know they have a place to go and people that provide support." As an advisor for 11 years, Ujkic has helped plan events like Club Rush, National Coming Out Day and the Safe Schools' prom.

"We did a clothing drive for The Center's queer and trans closet and provided 'pride gear' to our students, like bracelets, flags and shirts." About the breakfast, Ujkic said: "We're here every year. Students love seeing the LGBTQ flags and look forward to going on stage. And they really love the great food."

One of more than 50 corporate sponsors, the Coachella Valley Firebirds were honored to support the breakfast. A Firebirds pillar is maximizing the community's access to hockey, and that includes the LGBTQ community.

"The Firebirds had an amazing time at Pride last year, with our 'Hockey is for Everyone' float. We'll be back!" said Andrew Mason, senior director of community relations. "We've donated funds from worn player jerseys to support our LGBTQ youth and will continue that program. This amazing community has welcomed our team with open arms."

Ruth Hill, vice president of finance, said: "Being at the breakfast was a privilege. We all felt emboldened. Milk's heartfelt retelling of his uncle's vision touched me deeply, as did the words of students who were awarded scholarships."

Reflecting on the breakfast, Stuart said: "Occasions like this still play a vital role. My Uncle Harvey believed in the power of visibility and how staying out of sight keeps us from succeeding. Even in places like Palm Springs and at events like this, someone will witness the community support and say, 'maybe it's time I come out.' And that's why we need to keep celebrating our diversity … without exception."

Also recognized at the Breakfast were Frank Figueroa, Ed.D., who received the Leadership Award. He serves as the first openly gay city councilmember in the city of Coachella.\

Fernanda Telles-Quintero from Coachella Valley High School received the Outstanding Youth Scholarship. She will pursue a career in film production.

Edwardo Gallardo received the Burton/May Scholarship Award. Jessica Collins received the Burton/May Pride Award.

For more information about the Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast, visit pspride.org . To learn more about the Harvey Milk Foundation, go to milkfoundation.org .

Sergio Garcia enjoys writing about the good people that do great things in our community. Reach him at sergio071364@aol.

A Guide to Special Education Terms

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The number of students in special education has increased steadily in the last four decades , with parents more readily seeking additional support and more students being diagnosed with conditions, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder.

In the wake of the pandemic, though, districts struggle to hire and—more importantly—keep their special education teachers, who are often beleaguered by stressful working conditions and a lack of resources.

Even as the field shifts to address workforce shortages, with some states considering extra pay for special education and others eyeing how artificial intelligence could lessen the burden of increased workloads, students with disabilities make up roughly 13 percent of the school population, said Natasha Strassfeld, an assistant professor in the department of special education at the University of Texas at Austin.

These are key terms educators should know.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act , or IDEA , is a federal law that establishes the rights of students with disabilities and their families.

First passed in 1975 and most recently reauthorized in 2004, the act provides grant funding to states that agree to the federal government’s vision for educating students with disabilities, said Strassfeld.

Students must be identified, evaluated, and deemed as IDEA eligible for the state to use federal money to educate that child. There are 13 categories under which a student could be eligible, including physical and intellectual disabilities.

There are about seven million students served under IDEA, said Strassfeld.

An Individualized Education Program , or IEP , is a legally binding contract between a school district and a family with a child with a disability. Under IDEA, students are afforded an IEP, said Dia Jackson, senior researcher for special education, equity, and tiered systems of support at the American Institutes of Research.

IEPs spell out what area a student has a disability in, how it impacts learning, and what the school will do to address those needs, such as providing speech or occupational therapy, more intensive instructional supports, and accommodations, including for standardized tests and other learning goals.

The number of IEPs is increasing in schools as conditions, like autism spectrum disorder, or ADHD, are being diagnosed more readily.

All students with disabilities are protected under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which requires schools to make “reasonable accommodation” for students with disabilities.

Educators don’t have to make specially designed instruction plans under a 504, but students can get certain accommodations, like elevator passes if a student is in a wheelchair, Jackson said.

“It’s a slightly different focus, but both play out in schools,” Jackson said.

Individualized family services plans , or IFSPs, are developed for children up to age 3 who need help with communication, social-emotional skills, and physical needs, Strassfeld said.

Like an IEP, the plan is made in collaboration with a parent or guardian, along with professionals such as a child care provider, religious leaders, or doctors. The document outlines a plan for families to help seek services—such as speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, medical services, and more—but is focused more on the family’s goals rather than strictly educational goals, Strassfeld said.

“While they’re focusing on pre-education goals, primarily at that age, we’re thinking about that child as being a part of a component of a family,” she said.

The right to a Free Appropriate Public Education , or FAPE , means that for every IDEA-eligible student, services must be provided at no cost to the student or their family, must be appropriate for the needs of the child, and have to be education oriented, Strassfeld said.

With FAPE, there is also the concept of least restrictive environment, or LRE, Jackson said. Students should be included to the fullest extent possible in mainstream classrooms and be challenged but appropriately supported, alongside their general education peers.

That’s not without its challenges, however, Strassfeld said.

“IDEA essentially is premised on the philosophical notion that it is that easy. It’s a real challenge for school districts,” she said, adding that as parents and advocates examine special education through disability justice and disability studies lenses, there are more critiques of the model.

Jackson said that she’s heard criticism along these lines: When students with disabilities aren’t prepared for a general education environment, or when general education teachers don’t have training on special education.

Response to intervention , or RTI , came as an amendment to IDEA in 2004 to help earlier identify students who are struggling before they begin failing, Jackson said, and begin giving them additional support through a tiered process. Generally, all students receive “tier I” instruction on grade-level standards. Then, students who need additional help get more intensive supports. That could look like a teacher working one-on-one, or in small groups, helping target specific areas to improve learning.

Intervention is an evidence-based program meant to address a specific learning or social-emotional need. It can be done in a general education classroom, and looks like regular teaching, Jackson said, but it uses particular materials and involves collecting data on progress.

The term RTI has evolved into multitiered system of supports , or MTSS , which is also a preventative framework, but goes beyond academics to consider the infrastructure districts need to implement MTSS, Jackson said.

“The shift to MTSS is meant to be more inclusive of the infrastructure as well as inclusive of social-emotional learning as well as academics,” she said.

A functional behavior assessment , or FBA , is a way for educators to collect data on student behavior, and what is triggering certain unwanted behavior, Jackson said.

For instance, she said, if a teacher has a student who has autism and, when they get upset, they throw a chair, an FBA could be conducted.

Once that analysis is collected, a behavior intervention plan , or BIP , is developed, describing what the behavior is, how often it happens, and what will be done to address it.

FBAs and BIPs are not without concerns, however, as students with disabilities—especially students of color—are more likely to face exclusionary discipline, such as suspension and expulsion.

“A lot of times, it is a subjective judgment call if a student is exhibiting ‘appropriate behavior’ or not,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of potential bias that goes into discipline of students and behavior management.”

It’s one example of disproportionality , where an ethnic or racial group is over- or under-represented in certain areas. For instance, Jackson said, students of color with disabilities are over-represented in discipline, on being identified as having a disability, and being placed in more restrictive environments.

Restraint and seclusion are practices used in public schools as a response to student behavior that limits their movement and aims to deescalate them, by either physically limiting their movement (restraint) or isolating them from others (seclusion), according to previous EdWeek reporting .

The practice of physically restraining students with disabilities or placing them in isolation has been heavily scrutinized, but is still used in some states.

It should only be used in extreme cases when a student is at risk to harm themselves or others, Jackson said, but never as a behavior management technique, or as punishment. Students have been harmed, or even killed, as a result of restraints , Jackson said. Students of color are over-represented in the population who are restrained and isolated, Jackson added.

Even still, there are educators who don’t want to see the practices completely banned, Jackson said.

“Teachers have been hurt by students or they’ve been hurt in the midst of a restraint so they still want to have the option available,” she said. “It’s an issue of not having training in another alternative, so they feel like: ‘This is the only way I can handle this particular student, or type of student, because I don’t know anything else.’”

Strassfeld said that there’s been more focus on the practice alongside excessive force in law enforcement.

“There’s been discussion that disability advocates have had about criminalization of behaviors that a person has no control over, and this type of force seems to deny the humanity of people who perhaps are exhibiting behaviors they are not able to control,” she said.

Education Issues, Explained

Vanessa Solis, Associate Design Director contributed to this article.

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More severe weather forecast in Midwest as Iowa residents clean up tornado damage

GREENFIELD, Iowa (AP) — The skies were blue and the wind was blowing as residents of the small city of Greenfield, Iowa, worked to clean up two days after a destructive tornado ripped apart more than 100 homes in just one minute, took the lives of four residents and injured at least 35 more.

All along the mile-long swath Thursday was the deafening clamor of heavy equipment scooping up the splintered homes, smashed vehicles and shredded trees. But on either side of that path, picturesque houses and lawns seem untouched, and one might be hard-pressed to believe a twister packing peak winds of 175-185 mph (109-115 kph) had ravaged the community of 2,000.

More severe weather was expected in the Midwest on Thursday night into Friday, including a tornado that was on the ground for nearly an hour in southwestern Oklahoma and possible tornados in areas of Iowa that were already damaged.

The havoc spun by Tuesday’s tornado in Greenfield showed on the faces of people still processing how quickly homes and lives were shattered — some in mourning and many grateful to have been spared.

Among those killed were Dean and Pam Wiggins, said their grandson Tom Wiggins.

On Thursday, he tried to find any of his grandparents’ mementos that remained after the tornado demolished their home, leaving little more than its foundation. He described them as “incredibly loved by not only our family but the entire town.”

Not far away, Bill Yount was cleaning up.

“It’s like somebody took a bomb,” said Yount, gesturing to the land — covered with wood, debris, trees stripped of their leaves, heavy machinery and equipment to clean up the mess.

He waited out the storm in a closet.

“The roof raised up and slammed back down and then the windows all blew out,” he said Thursday. The tornado ripped the garage off his house and damaged interior walls. “Forty seconds changed my life immensely,” he said.

A black van ended up badly damaged and sitting between his house and a neighbor’s.

“Nobody knows whose it is,” he said.

Sherri Beitz was cleaning up outside, grateful that her mother, Ginger Thompson, 79, survived despite being unable to get to the basement of her house because she’s in a wheelchair.

“She was trapped for a while,” Beitz said. “It was a scary situation, but the main thing is she is OK. House can be replaced.”

“You look around and are just so grateful that the community didn’t lose more than what we did,” Beitz said.

Colton Newbury was working in Des Moines when the twister hit, nearly 60 miles (97 kilometers) away from his wife and 10-month-old daughter in Greenfield.

He rushed back only to find their home was “a hole in the ground,” he said. His wife hadn’t heard the sirens. Newbury said his cousin ran out to get his wife and baby, and they rode out the tornado in the cousin’s basement. The winds pulled entire homes away, he said: “About every house on the block, just foundations left.”

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response on Thursday as she sought a disaster declaration for multiple counties. After surveying Tuesday’s destruction, the National Weather Service determined that three separate powerful tornados carved paths totaling 130 miles (209.21 kilometers) across Iowa, according to Donna Dubberke, the meteorologist in charge in Des Moines.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said her agency will process the request as quickly as possible to get resources — which could include funding for temporary housing — to those left without homes.

More than 202 homes were  destroyed by a series of tornadoes  that raked the state on Tuesday, Reynolds said. Most were in and around Greenfield. The count does not include businesses or other buildings destroyed or damaged, like Greenfield’s 25-bed hospital.

The unsettled weather was expected to continue in the Midwest.

A tornado was on the ground in southwestern Oklahoma for nearly an hour on Thursday evening, the National Weather Service said. There were reports of some homes damaged, but no immediate reports of injuries, said meteorologist Jennifer Thompson.

The service had also received reports of very large hail — some the size of baseballs — while flash flooding occurred after 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) of rain fell along the path of the storm over about a three-hour period, Thompson said.

The weather service will have to investigate to determine how powerful the tornado was and for what distance it was on the ground, she said.

The weather service’s Storm Prediction Center showed an enhanced severe storm risk late Thursday into Friday morning for much of Nebraska and western Iowa, including areas where tornadoes hit Iowa and hurricane-force winds, large hail and torrential rain flooded streets and basements in Nebraska.

This latest band of severe weather — including possible tornadoes — will hit Iowa “when people are sleeping,” warned National Weather Service meteorologist Andrew Ansorge of Des Moines.

“Because of the damage already there, it won’t take much wind to inflict even more damage on these homes,” Ansorge said. “It’s just a bad deal all the way around.”

More severe weather also could arrive Saturday and Sunday in storm-damaged parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Beck reported from Omaha, Nebraska. Associated Press writers Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas; and Amy Beth Hanson in Helena, Montana contributed.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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