But as the Police Department has attracted an increasingly kaleidoscopic range of nationalities to its ranks in recent years — officers hail from Albania to Yemen — department statistics reveal a decline in new recruits among black New Yorkers.
The decline comes despite aggressive recruitment efforts in places like central Harlem and the Bronx, where the department regularly assigns friendly recruitment officers to visit.
In 2003, 18 percent of the Police Academy’s 2,108 graduates were black. Of the 1,247 recruits who started the academy this summer and will graduate on Friday, blacks make up about 10 percent, according to the department. By contrast, the percentage of Hispanic recruits has remained around 25 percent from 2003 till now, and the percentage of white non-Hispanic recruits has actually risen in recent years, to 57 percent from 52 percent in 2003.
