Local police don't look quite like the rest of Greater Lafayette.
Law enforcement agencies in Tippecanoe County are staffed disproportionately by white officers, leaving the community's sizable minority populations underrepresented behind the badge.
Attention to this imbalance, which persists in many municipalities across the country, was revived with the death of an unarmed black teen at the hands of an officer with a predominantly white police department outside St. Louis this summer.
About two-thirds of Ferguson, Missouri's, population is black, but more than 83 percent of its police force is white, placing it among the most racially imbalanced police departments in the country, according to a report by The Associated Press.
Overall, according to the AP report, the racial compositions of police departments serving Greater Lafayette come closer than cities such as Ferguson to reflecting the populations they serve. However, they lag behind more than half of the 1,400 agencies assessed in the report.
About a quarter of the residents in West Lafayette, for instance, aren't white, but there's just one black officer on the city's 47-member police force, leaving its ranks about 98 percent Caucasian.