Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the representativeness of police departments, i.e. the extent to which the demographics of sworn police officers mirror their local constituency’s demographic makeup, has an effect on communities. The study seeks to explain whether community complaints about police use of force are related to the representativeness of the police department. Design/methodology/approach The study examines the relationships between use of force complaints lodged against a police department and the representativeness of the police vis-à-vis their community using ordinary least squares regression and city fixed-effects models. The stratified sample of 100 large US cities uses data from the US Census Equal Employment Opportunity Survey and the Bureau of Justice Statistics Law Enforcement Management and Administration Statistics Survey from several points-in-time. Findings The analysis suggests that racial makeup and, to a lesser extent, local residency of police departments might matter in reducing community conflict with police, as represented by use of force complaints. However, the fixed-effects model suggests that unobserved community-level characteristics and context matter more than police departments’ representativeness. Originality/value This study seeks to provide a unique perspective and empirical evidence on community conflict with police by integrating the public administration theory of representative bureaucracy with criminal justice theories of policing legitimacy. The findings have implications for urban policing as well as law enforcement human capital and public management practices, which is essential to understand current crises in police-citizen relations in the US, especially in minority communities.

Amid a global pandemic, unprecedented numbers of citizens relied on essential public employees as lifelines for their health, safety, and connectedness to the broader community. These public servants worked tirelessly through collective trauma to ensure their neighbors had what was needed to maintain some semblance of a routine in an otherwise unpredictable environment. This article uses narrative inquiry to examine the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic disruption on the public sector workplace, the quality of work life, and to investigate how employees coped during the crisis. Our research reports on interviews with 43 front-line and behind-the-scenes public employees who describe how they coped, maintained their public service motivation, and worked through increased demands for emotional labor in this new work-life environment. The findings suggest the need for human resources policies that allow for a flexible, reflective, holistic, and person-centered approach.

This article identifies the ways that White supremacy manifests throughout the field of public administration in its research and scholarship. Through a critical discourse analysis of symposia over a period of 20 years in three foremost public administration journals, this paper investigates the extent to which each journal either reinforces or resists systemic racism. Peer-reviewed journals serve as gatekeepers to advancing and shaping the direction of research; as such, symposia are a mechanism through which editors signal interest, create intellectual space, open dialogue in a particular research direction, and share editorial power with guest editors who either represent marginalized or hegemonic identities and positions. Our analysis reveals there is an opportunity to enhance race-consciousness, intentional anti-racist language, powersharing, and resistance in future symposia. The article concludes by offering a path forward toward dismantling, reconciling, and repairing the entrenched, systemic, and historic racism and anti-Blackness in the field of public administration.

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Social upheavals are punctuation marks in the progression toward social equity. The American democratic mythos has evolved since the first days of the republic. Those who were ‘in the room’ when the Constitution was signed drove the interests that were represented and protected. Those in the room now are different, infusing old words with new meanings. Today’s fissured political culture, combined with the ripple effects of a global pandemic, offer another upheaval and create the opportunity to impel social justice. The ongoing process of meaning-making transforms power and advantage. This essay urges public service professionals to adopt a message that champions the mythos while acknowledging lived reality.