Baton Rouge is 55 percent black. Its police department is 69 percent white.

The Baton Rouge police force racial makeup is much whiter than the city itself.

(Image credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

published 7 July 2016

Scrutiny of the police of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling by two officers early Tuesday finds the department's racial makeup is significantly different from the city it patrols.

While Baton Rouge is a majority-black city — 55 percent of citizens are African-American — the police force is overwhelmingly white. Just 30 percent of officers are black, and 69 percent are white. The population of Baton Rouge itself is just 36 percent white.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.