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Practitioner Points• An increase in the proportion of ethnic minority police officers is significantly associated with a decrease in police misconduct as measured by substantiated complaints per officer.• Black citizens make fewer complaints against an ethnically representative police force.• With increasing ethnic representativeness, local citizens tend to be less rather than more satisfied with the services that minority officers provide.• Benefits associated with bureaucratic representativeness derive from wide-scale, substantive organizational changes that improve attitudes and behaviors toward minorities rather than the mere increase in minority officers.

In 1999, the U.K. government set force-specific 10-year targets for recruiting new police officers from ethnic minorities. Using these targets as instrumental variables, this study finds that this policy mandating an increase in the share of ethnic minority officers in a given force is associated with a decrease in the number of crimes in the area under the force's jurisdiction during the 10-year period. It is argued that greater representativeness and diversity within a public organization improves organizational integrity, which influences bureaucrats' attitudes and behaviors toward minority citizens. In the context of policing, diversity can mitigate the institutionalized practice of officers acting on implicit assumptions about minorities being inherently more unlawful than whites: Police representativeness is associated with a decrease in the overrepresentation of black individuals among those subject to "stop and search." Such a change may make minority citizens more willing to cooperate in the coproduction of public values, facilitating the attainment of organizational goals. C 2015 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Prior research on citizen participation has noted a tension between fostering an inclusive policymaking process and simultaneously maintaining a competent pool of participating citizens. This study investigates the implications of this trade-off by testing the impact of measured levels of inclusiveness and participating citizens' knowledgeability on two performance metrics: citizen engagement and process efficiency. Results indicate that although inclusiveness may be negatively associated with the level of engagement, both knowledgeability and inclusiveness are positively associated with process efficiency. Overall, the findings suggest that policymakers can pursue the democratic ideal of opening policymaking to the citizenry while still maintaining an efficient process.