The relationships between police and ethnic and racial minorities present some of the more enduring and complex problems in policing throughout the world. Such relationships can be harmonious, but they often are problematic. For example, minorities may be generally deprived of police protection and other services to which they are entitled. More specifically, police may refrain from addressing criminal behavior (e.g., domestic violence) within a particular minority group because they believe that members of that group typically engage in such behavior. A more acute problem is direct conflict between police and minorities. On the part of police, conflict may take the form of harassment, brutality, or excessive enforcement.

Although it is no excuse for lack of fairness, police attitudes toward minorities reflect the values of the larger community. When the community is hostile toward a particular minority group, police may feel that discriminatory behavior toward that group is justified. Police even may aggravate an existing prejudice, though they seldom generate prejudice on their own.

The intensity of community and police prejudice against minority groups depends on historical and social factors. The longer a minority has been seen as inferior or alien, the more likely it is to be discriminated against. Such groups may include perennial nomads (such as the Roma in Europe), indigenous peoples in former European colonies, or smaller tribes in societies where tribal membership is socially significant. A war or a warlike situation can provoke hostility toward certain immigrant groups or other minorities perceived as the “enemy”: Japanese Americans were treated in this way during World War II, as were many Muslims in Western countries after the terrorist September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. Police discrimination also may occur when the majority of a society perceives a minority group as refusing to endorse the majority’s values. For instance, the conspicuously inferior status of women in some immigrant communities in Western countries has engendered considerable hostility toward the men in those communities. Finally, circumstantial resentment plays an important part in discrimination against minorities: immigrant workers who were welcomed by the majority when work was plentiful may be the target of harassment in periods of unemployment.

Recruitment policies that determine the racial and ethnic makeup of a police force can significantly affect the relationships between the police and minorities. Although it is no guarantee of harmony, it is desirable that the racial and ethnic composition of the force reflect that of the larger community. However, that goal is often difficult to achieve. For instance, in large American cities such as Chicago, significant segments of the Hispanic minority speak only Spanish, which precludes their being recruited by the police. The worst-case scenario occurs when the whole police organization is made up of members of a community that is in open conflict with another group. That was the case in the United States during the segregation of African Americans in the South—some police officers actually were members of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. It was also the case in the late 1960s in Northern Ireland, where despite a provision that the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) recruit one-third of its members from among Ulster Catholics, the proportion of Catholics in the force was much smaller than that. The RUC was severely criticized for its brutality in policing the Catholic civil rights marches in 1968–69. The bias in police recruitment was even worse in South Africa under apartheid, when the police forces were all-white organizations that frequently abused their power in dealings with Black South Africans.

Today, although troublesome relationships between police and minorities remain common, police are increasingly aware of such problems and have taken broad steps to solve them, though with limited success through the early 21st century. Community policing reforms, for example, were motivated in part by the desire to reduce conflict with minorities. However, improvements can happen only in societies in which there is police accountability. Without accountability, complaints about police actions may be met with severe reprisals, including the killing of complainants by police officers.

In the United States, the fatal police shooting of an African American teenager in 2014 and the death in the same year of an African American man who had been held in an illegal choke hold by a police officer led to the creation of a new social movement, Black Lives Matter, that aimed to raise awareness of the connection between police brutality and racism and called for greater police accountability and other reforms. The movement thereafter played a prominent role in protests following other incidents of extreme police brutality against African Americans.

Crowds and riots

Collective violence is one of the most intractable problems of policing. Riots have played a role both in the creation of police forces and in their reform. For instance, frequent and serious rioting in Britain during the 18th century, such as the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, left a lasting impression on police reformers. The subsequent Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which cavalry killed 11 protesters and injured several hundred, helped to spur the British government to create the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. Riots also had played a considerable part in the creation of the French police in 1666. By the end of the 20th century, however, many police forces were coming under increasing criticism for their often brutal methods of controlling crowds.