Rachel Harmon: belief

Transcript context

…I believe that, right now, around one-eighth of police officers are women. Should that percentage be higher as a way of addressing police misconduct? You might want it to be higher for other equity reasons; that’s fine. But in terms of people being happier with their police, would it help? I’m not sure we know for sure. The studies on gender show a little bit better effect than the studies on racial diversity in policing, and I think communities do value diverse police departments that reflect what the community looks like. And certainly, women might help, but I don’t take diversity in policing to be a solution to problems in policing. I think it’s an end that we might pursue for other reasons. But if I think of data on nonpolice behavior, for whatever reasons, women are much less violently aggressive than are men. So you might think if the police force were half women, more or less, the cases we’re worried about would fall significantly. If that’s not true, what’s your intuition for why not?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.