At 32 of 33 UC and CSU campuses, police officers are whiter than the students — and in many cases, disparities are glaring
CALIFORNIA, USA — California’s public universities are among the most racially diverse in the nation, but campus police departments don’t reflect that diversity.
At 32 of 33 public university campuses, police officers are whiter than the students they serve, a CalMatters review of officer demographics shows. And in many cases, the disparities are glaring: Cal State Monterey Bay, for example, has a student population that is just over a quarter white. Yet of the university’s 15 police officers, 12 of them are white — about 80%.
The same story repeats across the state. Overall, the University of California and the California State University systems employ nearly 800 sworn officers. Roughly half of them are white, compared with less than a quarter of students attending the two systems.
CalMatters obtained records of the race and gender of every active, sworn police officer at UC and CSU as of February 11, 2021 from the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. The statistics alone don’t tell the whole story: Individual law enforcement agencies self-report racial…
