The FBI Is Still So White: raceAhead

While that was not the subject of the Mueller hearing, diversity in federal law enforcement deserves its own Congressional moment.

I’m going to sidestep the hot takes, explainers, and partisan talking points that are filling the airwaves after Robert Mueller’s testimony today, and return to a tried and true raceAhead reframe: The FBI is so, so white.

I first raised this issue after President Trump abruptly fired then FBI director James Comey in 2017. He learned of his dismissal while visiting with FBI agents in Los Angeles, in part to prepare for a diversity recruiting event he was scheduled to attend later that evening.

Here’s what I said then:

While this may be the least interesting element of yesterday’s news, the FBI’s stunning lack of diversity remains one of the more serious issues facing the agency—and the country it serves—in the long term. According to the FBI’s own statistics, 83% of special agents, 78% of intelligence analysts, and 69% of professional staff are white. Comey, as it turned out, was on the case.

[In July 2016], the former director gave a speech to a group of security officials for HBCUs at the invitation of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla. “We have a crisis in the FBI and it is this: Slowly but steadily over the last decade or more, the percentage of special agents in the FBI who are white has been growing.’’ It was a time when many leaders were struggling to articulate a message on race and police violence, and Comey did not disappoint. He told the group that it was his job to reverse the trend at the FBI. “That is a path to a fall down a flight of stairs… 83% will become 100%, and we will be less effective for the American people,” he said. “I will have failed if I don’t change this.”

So, he failed. 

Worse, so did the Senate, who failed to raise the issue during current director Christopher Wray’s lengthy confirmation hearing. (And despite my persistent Twitter campaign asking Judiciary Committee members to ask Wray about his plans to make the FBI more inclusive. So, I failed too.)

But as important as today’s hearing may have been, a Congressional inquiry into the lack of diversity in federal law enforcement is long overdue.

Comey made an earlier appeal for federal law enforcement reform during a candid speech at Georgetown in February 2015. He talked about the “complicated” relationship between law enforcement and their communities, he spoke about Michael Brown and Eric Garner, unconscious bias, and affirmed the anger many feel toward law enforcement. “All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty.” 

His solution: Law enforcement agencies, biased and burdened by an unpretty history, have to do the hard work “to design systems and processes to overcome that very human part of us all.”

While we wait, the FBI’s diversity numbers haven’t changed. And if my razor-sharp instincts are correct, they’re not going to any time soon. So, will we ever hear a new rallying cry from the FBI—Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity… Diversity?