It’s no secret that the FBI has a problem with race. Former Director James Comey even called the FBI’s lack of racial diversity a “crisis.”
Some have argued that the top federal law enforcement agency’s failure
to recruit a force that is better representative of the country is a
liability and a security threat. The bureau has spent much effort and
money over the last three decades trying to fix the problem — and yet
its ranks have only grown less diverse after 9/11.
Eighty-three percent of the FBI’s 13,500 special agents are white
— and only 4.4. percent are black, even though African-Americans make up
12 percent of the U.S. population. That’s down from about 6.5 percent
just a decade ago, a retired, high-ranking FBI official involved in the
agency’s diversity efforts told The Intercept. In the mid-90s, after a
class-action discrimination lawsuit brought by black FBI agents, black
officers made up 5.3 percent of the force.
And that’s just the race problem within the FBI. It’s hard
to diversify an agency that many still associate with the systemic
surveillance, infiltration, and repression of civil rights activists in
the past — and which maintains ample discretion today to target individuals and groups it deems suspicious based on criteria that all too often reflect their race or religion.
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