Last week, The Kansas City Star published all of the seven mayoral candidates' plans to address violent crime. One of the hopefuls, attorney Sly James, voiced his opinion that the Kansas City Police Department needs more diversity on the force. It's not the first time we've heard that sentiment.
Which begs the question: How white is the KCPD, really? The answer: lily.
The KCPD Media Unit was kind enough to send us demographic data from December 2010 that divvies up all sworn KCPD officers by race and gender. Observe the male-cop graph:
percent of KCPD officers who are white males. (In numbers, that's 971 white guys.) The purple sliver is the 8 percent of black male KCPD officers (116 black guys). There are 52 Hispanic men on the force, which is about 4 percent, and the rest, "Other," breaks down like this: Indian (.35
percent), Asian (6 percent), Pacific Islander (.14 percent), mixed race
(3.7 percent) and unknown* (1.4 percent).
The corresponding graph for female police officers is below:
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