BOSTON — Police departments in some of Massachusetts' most diverse cities are still struggling to diversify their own ranks, especially at higher levelsaccording to data obtained by 5 Investigatesat The Enterprise's news media partner, WCVB-TV.
In many Massachusetts cities, that means mostly white police departments are enforcing laws in mostly minority communities.
To Christelle Jean, a 16-year-old student activist in Malden, not seeing police officers who look like her and many of her friends is part of the mistrust of police she said is widespread among young people in Malden.
"When you don't see anyone who looks like you, who's fighting for you, then you assume that there's an authoritative figure who's hovering over you and has no intention of pushing through whatever you need," she said. "I know from me and my classmates that whenever there's a police presence, it's not a sign of someone's here to help me."
Jean has helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally and a rally for more diversity in the school department. She said her goal is to have more Black and brown voices in positions of power, including the police.
The department is 81 percent white, according to records provided to 5 Investigates, compared to the city, which is 47 percent white, according to census data.
But Malden is hardly unique. Some examples from what 5 Investigates found:
Lynn Police Department is 84 percent white, while the city itself is 36 percent white
Quincy police: 95 percent white
Everett police: 87 percent white
Worcester police: 79 percent white
New Bedford police: 76 percent white
Lowell police: 75 percent white
Randolph police: 71 percent white
Holyoke police: 67 percent white
Some departments have been able to diversity their ranks to about half nonwhite, including:
Lawrence police: 47 percent white
Springfield police: 52 percent white
Chelsea police: 55 percent white
"People want to know that their institutions, particularly institutions like police, that we give so much power to, are going to reflect the people who they police," said Jack McDevitt, director of Northeastern University's Institute on Race and Justice.
Mistrust of police is one barrier to diversity hiring, McDevitt said.
"Right now, the police chiefs I work with are saying it's harder than it's ever been to convince young people of color that policing is an occupation for them," he said.
Another factor, according to McDevitt as well as many police chiefs, is the state civil service test. Devised as a guard against patronage hiring, it's now discussed as a significant barrier to diversity.
"I think that now it might be an opportunity to revisit it in a way where we have better measurements," he said.
"And what are those things?" 5 Investigates' Karen Anderson asked.
"Things like communication skills," McDevitt said. "There are many better ways to assess someone's communication skill than giving you a paper and pencil test that sees what their vocabulary might be."
Another criticism of the test is how it favors veterans over all other candidates, potentially forcing a chief to hire a white veteran over a minority who did not serve in the military. And even when minority candidates are hired, it can take years to change the demographic makeup of the force.
Gov. Charlie Baker's administration says their human resources division is continuing to look at the civil service test to make sure it is fair and unbiased, and says a majority of the questions are not dependent on education or academic achievement.
To overcome the challenges posed by the civil service system, some police chiefs are ramping up recruiting, even using school resource officers to help identify promising minority candidates.
Helping those candidates with the civil service test, whether paying the $200 fee or providing free classes to help increase scores, is another.
Lowell police have employed both.
"Whatever outreach we can do to educate our young about the pluses of being a police officer in the city in the effect that the positive effect you can have is a big thing for us," Police Superintendent Kelly Richardson told 5 Investigates.
That outreach helped get Samantha Coleman into the Lowell Police Academy. She said she's looking forward to being a police officer after working with people with disabilities.
"Being able to serve your community at the highest regard, I think that's what a police officer does. They are community servants. That's what really pushed me to get out and pursue this career," she said.
Coleman took the free class offered by Lowell police to help prepare candidates for the civil service exam.
"They were so kind and welcoming and made you feel at home. They are like, 'We want to help you. We want to help to prepare you to be successful.' I thought that was very helpful and I loved that," she said.
Both she and Richardson believe diversity includes, but isn't limited to, skin color.
"We're trying to recruit young people in this city to have similar life experiences that people live in this city. That's what the ultimate goal is," Richardson said. "The last two or three academy classes, the majority of those classes came from single-family homes. I think that's a huge life experience to have, that when you step into someone else's life and have to make decisions, that you've lived those experiences and you know where that person has been is very, very important in policing."
Another avenue that some departments follow to add more diversity candidates is to use a cadet program. It allows cadets to be hired outside of the civil service system after they have worked at a department for a certain period of time as a cadet.
That's how current Boston police Commissioner William Gross joined the department in 1983.
"This isn't the old days. You're welcome to become a Boston police officer," Gross told 5 Investigates.
Boston has made progress in diversifying. Nonwhite officers now make up 34 percent of the police department, though that still lags behind the city's nonwhite population, 55 percent.
The commissioner's command staff, consisting of superintendents and deputy superintendents, are about half people of color.
But 5 Investigates found there are still major diversity gaps, starting with superior officers promoted through the state civil service exam process. For example, 79 percent of Boston's sergeants and 97 percent of the department's lieutenants are white.
Boston's not alone in having superior officers be largely white.
In Everett, for example, every sergeant or higher is white. In Fall River, all but two civil service superior officers are white.
"What we need to be able to say is, hey, we are identifying, recruiting and implementing and then promoting candidates of color," said Sophia Hall of Lawyers for Civil Rights.
Hall said not only promotions up the chain of command are important, so too are assignments to what she called elite units like homicide and gang-focused units.
"They do a lot of very serious and important work in the community. And to say that those units should be predominantly white and that we can't take more systemic measures to ensure that they actually have diversity again is really problematic," she said.
Our analysis shows many of Boston's specialized units are still largely white. Not counting officers out injured, Boston's homicide unit is 66 percent white; bomb squad is 69 percent white; and the Youth Violence Strike Force is 67 percent white.
In other units, we found there is progress. Boston's human trafficking unit is 20 percent white. Internal affairs is 46 percent white.
Gross says it's not always a simple fix.
"You can't just put somebody in the homicide unit. There's a lot of time away from the family. There's a lot of things that people say. I just don't want to deal with the death of a child or senior or it's just not for me. So we look for people who want to go to homicide, right?" he said.
Back in Malden, Officer Trent Headley lives both sides of the issue. He was the only African American officer in the department when he was hired 27 years ago.
Since then, the department has made "great strides," he said. The numbers and the attitudes have changed.
He and other minority officers in the department tell 5 Investigates they understand the mistrust, but say they don't think it's warranted when it comes to the Malden Police Department.
"You have got to treat the people with respect and all that other stuff will take care of itself in time," he said.