Baton Rouge is 55 percent black. Its police department is 69 percent white.
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.
Baton Rouge's 25-point disparity of black citizens vs. black officers is the largest such difference among 269 major police departments considered in an analysis from WWL-TV. For comparison, nearby New Orleans is 59 percent African American and the New Orleans Police Department is a near-perfect mirror of the general population at 58 percent black.
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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.
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