This article examines the assumption that African Americans and other low-income groups in the U.S. are systematically deprived in the distribution of services related to street quality, recreational facilities, police resources and libraries. Various studies have described the pattern of service distribution for police, parks and libraries, education and bureaucratic responsiveness to citizen-initiated service contracts. These research efforts suggest a variety of distributional patterns, ranging from dispersed inequalities to unpatterned inequalities to nonlinear relationships between race and service levels. In addition, the evidence suggests that racial discrimination in the delivery and distribution of basic public services in large U.S. cities is probably atypical. Although the operation of administrative rules in service delivery bureaucracies may have adverse consequences for certain groups in the population, distributional decision making appears to be little affected by the racial and socioeconomic characteristics of urban neighborhoods. Apparently explicit racial criteria are seldom employed as a guide to the resolution of distribution issues. The analysis of the research will proceed in two steps. First, the pattern of resource distribution for park and library services in several Virginia cities will be described. Second, the role of organizational rules in distributional decision making and their impact on the differential distribution of urban public services will be explored.