Hamilton Co. law enforcement mostly white

Like many law-enforcement agencies nationwide, the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office isn't an accurate reflection of the area's racial makeup.

Spokesman Michael Robison this week released staffing numbers in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by The Enquirer. The department tallied its 864 employees as follows:

•745, or 86 percent, are white,

•105, or 12 percent, are African-American,

•10, or 1 percent, are Hispanic, and

•3 are Asian and 1 is American Indian or Alaska Native.

Based on data collected in the 2010 U.S. Census, the county's demographic makeup is 62 percent white, 26 percent African-American, nearly 3 percent Hispanic, 2.3 percent Asian and less than a half-percent American Indian and Alaska Native.

However, Jeff Rexhausen, a senior research associate with the University of Cincinnati Economics Center, said those numbers don't paint the whole picture. He said that the sheriff's department likely does more patrolling outside of the city, which has its own department. The racial makeup outside of the city is about 78 percent white.

Rexhausen also pointed to the Census' 2006-2010 Equal Employment Opportunity Tabulation – highlighting the diversity of the labor force based on five years of data – which indicates that about 3,700 police officers live in the metropolitan area, of which nearly 90 percent are white.

"Workforce diversity is a high priority for many employers, but their ability to achieve diversity objectives is constrained by the composition of the local workforce," Rexhausen told The Enquirer in an email.

Employers can recruit outside of the metropolitan area, he said, but that just increases the competition.

The sheriff's released numbers come a week after the USA TODAY analyzed the racial makeup of law-enforcement agencies nationwide as police departments face widespread protests against racial profiling and police brutality. In the USA TODAY story, experts and police officers said that a force that racially and ethnically reflects a community's population can improve relations, dispel mistrust and communicate more effectively.

The Enquirer, as part of that analysis, requested a racial breakdown of the Cincinnati Police Department and the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office. The latter agency didn't immediately provide the numbers because of a personnel issue.

Among the analysis' findings were that minority officers in the U.S. are concentrated in a few metropolises, as more than one-third of 111,000 black officers worked in just 10 cities.

Also, in 80 of 282 cities with more than 100,000 residents, the disparity between representation of blacks on the police force and in the community was greater than 10 percentage points – Cincinnati among them, with a police force that's 67 percent white, 30 percent black and 3 percent "other." By comparison, 2010 Census data indicates the city is about 48 percent white, 45 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic and 2 percent Asian.

In 10 cities, including Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland, the disparity of blacks in uniform and in the community surpassed 25 percentage points.

Large disparities exist for the Hispanic population in even more cities, with the disparity between Hispanic representation among the police versus the population being greater than 10 percentage points in at least 125 cities.