WASHINGTON — Broadening its push to improve police relations with minorities, the Justice Department has enlisted a team of criminal justice researchers to study racial bias in law enforcement in five American cities and recommend strategies to address the problem nationally, Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday.

The police shooting last month of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri underscored the need for the long-planned initiative, Holder said in an interview with The Associated Press.

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Attorney General Eric Holder says the three-year project could be a “silver lining” if it helps ease racial tensions and “pockets of distrust.” The Associated Press

He said the three-year project could be a “silver lining” if it helps ease racial tensions and “pockets of distrust that show up between law enforcement and the communities that they serve.”

“What I saw in Ferguson confirmed for me that the need for such an effort was pretty clear,” Holder said.

The five cities have not yet been selected, but the researchers say they are bringing a holistic approach that combines training of police officers on issues of racial bias, data analysis and interviews with community residents. They will be reviewing police behavior in the cities and relationships between law enforcement and the neighborhoods. The hope is to create a model that could be broadly applied in other cities.

Though the project was in the works before Ferguson, the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson spotlighted longstanding concerns about diversity in policing. The Ferguson police force is overwhelmingly white even though the suburban St. Louis city is roughly 70 percent black. A 2013 report by the Missouri attorney general’s office found that Ferguson police stopped and arrested black drivers nearly twice as often as white motorists, but were less likely to find contraband among the black drivers.

Holder, who visited Ferguson last month to meet with Brown’s parents and others said he was struck by the number of complaints he heard about traffic stops and the concerns from minorities about being treated unfairly by police.

“The reality is that it certainly had a negative impact on people’s view of the effectiveness and fairness of the police department,” Holder said.

The Justice Department this month announced a civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police force. In the past five years, the department has launched about 20 similarly broad probes of police departments that looked at problems including use-of-force and racial bias. Holder has spoken repeatedly of his concerns of the disparate treatment of minorities by some in law enforcement, recently sharing personal anecdotes of a “humiliating” encounter with police.

In April, months after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the department announced that it was soliciting bids for a $4.75 million racial bias project that would collect data on stops, searches and arrests. On Thursday, the department will announce that it will provide grants to a team of researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Yale University, UCLA and the Urban Institute.

“It represents, I think, an attempt for this administration to partner with researchers who are tired of tragedy being followed by embarrassment,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a UCLA professor who specializes in racial discrimination.

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