* The New York Times has an interesting story on the divergence between the percentage of white residents and the percentage of whites in a municipality’s police force. That divergence was, as you may recall, particularly large in the case of Ferguson, Mo. There’s an argument to be made that it would be good public policy to increase the number of blacks on the police force in a locality with an increasing black population, particularly because — although the Times writers are chary of noting this fact, well known to just about every American — blacks are far more likely to commit crimes and to be victims of crimes than other Americans. In those circumstances, it’s helpful if police are able to interact freely and comfortably with those whom they are trying to protect and wrongdoers they are trying to deter or apprehend.

Why aren’t there more black police officers in Ferguson? Well, one reason is that Ferguson blacks don’t vote very much in local elections; as this Monkey Cage blog post shows, Ferguson blacks turned out about as frequently as Ferguson whites in the November 2012 presidential elections, but at a much lower rate than whites in the April 2013 municipal elections. The writers try to pin the blame on the progressive reformers of a century ago who scheduled local elections at different times from national elections.

But the more proximate causes, I suspect, are that Ferguson blacks are more likely than Ferguson whites to be renters, often in Section 8 housing, as this Monkey Cage story makes clear, and that renters don’t directly pay property taxes or, in the case of subsidized Section 8 renters, may not effectively pay them at all. And they don’t have a vested interest in property values either; if you’re renting, better to keep them from rising. Another, related possible reason: Ferguson blacks are less likely than whites to have deep roots in Ferguson, to participate in local community associations, to belong to local churches, etc.

A third factor, getting back to police forces, is that there simply aren’t that many police officers in Ferguson: 54, according to the Times, in a municipality with 21,000 residents. Police officers have civil service protections, union representation and a vested interest in remaining in their jobs until they are eligible for maximum pensions. So there aren’t likely to be many — maybe any — openings in the Ferguson police force in any given year. Therefore, even if the local council would like to hire more black policemen, they aren’t going to be able to do so quickly, at least without expanding the force, an expensive proposition for a small municipality.

The Times presents a raft of statistics on racial population and police force percentages in municipalities in many major metropolitan areas, in support of its proposition that “whites” are over-represented and “non-whites” underrepresented in police forces. But by highlighting the percentages and understating (though providing) the actual number of police, the article overstates the problem.

In metro St. Louis, the city of St. Louis (which is a separate jurisdiction outside St. Louis County) has by far the largest number of police officers, 1,348. As you can see from the bar graphs, there is not a big disparity between the black population and police force percentages. The next largest police force (110) is in St. Charles; the city has low black percentages in both population and police. That doesn’t look like a big problem. The biggest difference in the two percentages is in Dellwood, a town of 5,025, which has all of 18 policemen; I infer from the bar graph that one of them is black. A problem? I suppose it depends on how those 18 individual policemen behave and how well they relate to the majority-black population.

The Times’s emphasis on the distinction between “whites” and “non-whites” is, I think, positively unhelpful in considering some of the municipalities in other metropolitan areas. In metro New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are municipalities with Asian population majorities — “non-whites” in the Times’s argot — but very few Asian police officers. Is this a problem in Edison Township, N.J.(the nation’s leading Indian-American municipality), Fremont, Calif. (Asians from multiple countries), or Westminster, Calif. (large Vietnamese population)?

Asians tend to have very low crime rates, lower than whites in many areas. I very much doubt that Asian residents in Edison, Fremont and Westminster are simmering with resentment at their treatment by white police, and I would be surprised if even the most assiduous Times reporter, eager to find “whites” mistreating “non-whites,” could find evidence to the contrary.

In addition, the Times highlights many municipalities with much higher Hispanic population than police percentages (and in many cases, very small black population or police percentages). Hispanics have somewhat higher crime rates than whites or Asians, but significantly lower than blacks. It might be a good idea in some of these municipalities to hire more Hispanic police officers. But how many Hispanic police officers can a municipality hire if many Hispanics from the area are non-citizens or illegal immigrants? Inducting law-breakers into law enforcement doesn’t seem like a self-evidently good idea.

The Times article looks like an attempt to argue that the difference between black population and police percentages is a huge national problem in most big metropolitan areas. What the data actually suggest that it is a small local problem in a relatively few municipalities scattered across the nation.