Louisiana State Police, overwhelmingly white & male, face new pressure to build diversity

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After Mississippi, Louisiana has the country's second-highest proportion of African-American residents, at 32 percent, but blacks make up just 16 percent of the 1,063 commissioned State Police troopers, according to state figures.

The agency also falls far below the national average of female representation in law enforcement, with women making up a paltry 4 percent of state troopers.

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"It's hard to police when your department is not reflective of your surroundings," said a veteran black trooper who spoke to The Advocate on the condition of anonymity. "I never thought that, in 2018, we'd still have a culture of minorities not having a voice or being able to speak out about diversity issues without being blackballed."

Reeves denies that race or gender has factored into hiring or promotions since he took the helm of the agency in March 2017. He succeeded Edmonson amid a series of scandals engulfing State Police, including one involving a group of troopers who charged taxpayers for a so-called "side trip" they took to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon while driving to a conference in California.

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Landry said a confluence of factors tend to hobble the recruiting of minorities, including some that are unique to State Police. For one, he said, State Police historically have had little presence in inner cities, which contain the highest concentrations of potential minority recruits.

"You compound that with some of the poor relationships between the African-American communities and the police, and it makes it difficult to recruit someone," he said. "We did everything humanly possible, sending troopers to schools and inner cities. We believed every trooper should have been a recruiter."

Recruiting women also has been a problem, and a number of female troopers have sued the agency over the years alleging sexual harassment and discrimination. One of them, Genny May, a former U.S. marshal who became the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in the State Police, claimed a decade ago that she had been wrongly denied promotions throughout her career due to the agency's "systemic exclusion" of women.

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