Black junior enlisted airmen are 86% more likely to receive non-judicial punishment or be referred to a court-martial over their white peers — but are less likely to be convicted, a new federally funded Rand Corp. study analyzing racial disparities within the service shows.
Despite the alarming numbers, the Rand Corp. study released earlier this month found that the underlying causes of that trend were not immediately clear. Roughly one-fifth of the Article 15 and court-martial referrals disparity between Black and white airmen was attributed to differences in career field, hometown of an airman and their Armed Forces Qualification Test scores, the report said.
“For example, it was noted to us in interviews that being late or falling asleep on duty would be disciplined much more severely if the airman were in Security Forces than if they were in Force Support, in large part because the potential consequences of this behavior in the former are more dire,” according to Rand.
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But the remaining four-fifths of the disparity “is unexplained,” according to researchers, and “the results are consistent with a situation in which disparate treatment may be at least partly responsible for the disparity.”
The study examined personnel and discipline data for the ranks E-1 through E-4 — those most likely to face punishment — between…
