Can Racial Diversity Attenuate Racial Discrimination in Service Interactions? Evidence from Cite-and-Release Decisions within Police Departments

Despite the belief that racial diversity in organizations will attenuate racial discrimination in service interactions, the extant literature suggests that it may often exacerbate discrimination by generating intergroup conflict. In this paper, I propose that the influence of racial diversity on racial discrimination in service interactions will depend upon (a) the level of interdependence within an organization and (b) whether an increase in diversity consists of a larger representation of a minority’s own racial group. To test my predictions, I combine interaction-level data covering approximately 200,000 cite-and-release decisions where suspects are either given a summons to attend court at a later date or transported to jail following arrest with longitudinal organization-level data from 93 police departments across the United States. Consistent with prior research, I found that minority suspects were less likely to be cited and released for the same offense relative to White suspects. Racial diversity among sworn officers in a police department exacerbated discrimination in cite-and-release decisions unless officers’ work roles were highly interdependent due to the adoption of community-oriented policing. Focusing on Black and Hispanic suspects, I observed this pattern regardless of whether an increase in racial diversity in the department was characterized by a larger representation of a minority suspect’s own racial group or other minority racial groups. Taken together, the findings suggest that diverse organizations can mitigate the emergence of intergroup conflict that exacerbates racial discrimination in service interactions by fostering interdependencies.