© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Public Management Research Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. 547 Journal of Public Administration Research And Theory, 2017, 547–561 doi:10.1093/jopart/mux012 Article Advance Access publication July 6, 2017 Article Black in Blue: Racial Profling and Representative Bureaucracy in Policing Revisited Sounman Hong Yonsei University Address correspondence to the author at sounman_hong@yonsei.ac.kr . Abstract This study examines the association between the degree to which a police force is ethnically rep- resentative of the population it serves and the force’s engagement in racial profling as a polic- ing tactic. Evidence for this study comes from English and Welsh police forces that implemented force-specifc recruitment targets for offcers from ethnic minority backgrounds between 2000 and 2010. Results suggest that an increase in the proportion of ethnic minorities on a police force is signifcantly associated with a decrease in the proportion of ethnic minorities that are stopped and searched by that police force. We also examine whether the effects of representative bureaucracy accrue nonlinearly or dynamically. This analysis failed to produce strong evidence for the “reform fatigue” and “diversity fatigue” hypotheses. Finally, we demonstrate that active representation has primarily occurred in forces in which racial profling was intensively used as a policing tactic. These fndings have implications for the democratic legitimacy of representative bureaucracy. Introduction This article revisits a long-standing, but still-contested research question: does passive representation lead to active representation? The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that the answer to this question is yes—passive representation (the extent to which public agencies employ minority staff members) indeed results in active representation (the extent to which those agencies advocate for policy changes that ben- eft minorities; Krislov and Rosenbloom 1981; Mosher 1982). This relationship has been tested and supported across multiple types of public services (Andrews, Ashworth, and Meier 2014; Bradbury and Kellough 2008; Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard 1999). With respect to the ethnic representativeness of police services, however, some studies have produced evidence that challenges the theory’s prediction. For example, Wilkins and Williams (2008) found that the presence of black police offcers on a police force is counterintuitively associated with an increase in the degree to which the force engages in racial profling. Similarly, studies of British police forces have demon- strated that the link between passive and active repre- sentation is unfounded because ethnic minority police offcers tend to have different education levels, social classes, and residential profles than minority victims or suspects (Holdaway 1996; Rowe 2012). In contrast to the theory of representative bureaucracy, this group of studies provides support for the theory of organiza- tional socialization, which dictates that a police force’s occupational culture transcends the ethnic identities of its minority offcers. In this way, these minority offc- ers do not identify as “black,” but “blue” (Rowe 2012; Van Maanen 1975; Wilkins and Williams 2008). In this study, we challenge the validity of organi- zational socialization theory in the context of ethnic representation in police forces. Specifcally, we con- tend that past empirical evidence fails to show the true effects of increasing ethnic representation in police organizations for two key reasons. First, it is often dif- fcult to estimate the effects of representative bureau- cracy, as the composition of the public workforce Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article/27/4/547/3930869 by guest on 21 January 2023