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August 17 - August 24, 2020
First, there are stark differences. Second, young men of color are clearly targeted for more aggressive treatment. Third, these differences are not fully justified by differences in criminality. Fourth, the aggressive use of traffic stops as a tool to investigate possible criminal behavior, though justified as part of the war on crime, is surprisingly inefficient, rarely leading to arrests for contraband.
rates of voting move from 36 percent among those with high legitimacy to just 23 percent among those ascribing low levels of legitimacy to the police and the courts (Tyler and Jackson 2014, 89).
Recall that legitimacy, throughout Tyler’s various works, is unrelated to the favorability of the outcome the individual received in their interaction with the legal system; rather it has to do with the sense of fairness of the procedures.
A recent study by a team of Stanford psychologists and computer scientists analyzed audio transcripts taken from police body cameras in Oakland California in April 2014. Looking at the language used in the interactions, and comparing how the officers interacted with black and white drivers, this study of 981 traffic stops and over 36,000 utterances found that officers used more respectful language when interacting with white drivers: they were more likely to refer to them by their last names rather than by their first name or by a nickname, more likely to say “please,” less likely to use
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The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) promoted the use of profiles largely on the basis of the work of Florida state trooper Bob Vogel,
(An early element of the courier profile, in fact, was that cars obeying the speed limit were suspect – their desire to avoid being stopped made them stand out.)”
Until the Fourth Amendment … is rewritten, the person and the effects of the individual are beyond the reach of all government agencies until there are reasonable grounds to believe (probable cause) that a criminal venture has been launched or is about to be launched. There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today. Yet if the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up
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We moved from “probable cause” to “articulable suspicion” in 1968 and in 1996 we moved to a full constitutional protection for selective application of the letter of every traffic law, including as a pretext for “some additional law enforcement objective.”
The poor are particularly targeted because of the number of vehicle violations associated with broken tail-lights, equipment problems, and expired registration tags, issues that are more likely to occur among the poor than among the middle class.
The US Department of Justice investigation of the Ferguson (Missouri) Police Department used similar data to show that citizen complaints were indeed based on real, tangible, measurable disparities in treatment of citizens of different race. A particularly egregious finding of the Ferguson report was the degree to which the city had come to use court fees as a source of municipal revenue. The city relied on its poorest residents for traffic fines, court fees, and arrests because all of these were income-generating activities for the city.
Whereas 3 percent of traffic stops lead to a search, only about one-third of those searches lead to contraband. Further, only about half of those contraband hits lead to arrest,
Glaser’s definition (race as any part of a judgment) is close to what many civil rights advocates use; Fridell’s definition (race as the sole basis of a decision) is close to what police officers themselves might recognize as profiling.
Explicit prejudice is a set of feelings about others that are consciously accessible, seemingly controllable, and self-reported. Racism based on explicit prejudice is referred to as old-fashioned or overt racism. Implicit prejudice may or may not be consciously accessible, and may be difficult or impossible to control. Implicit prejudice is believed to be a consequence of years of exposure to associations in the environment, it tends to be impervious to conscious control, and it is relatively stable. Racism based on implicit prejudice has various names: subtle, covert, modern, ambivalent, or
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In particular, as relates to the decision to shoot or not to shoot a hypothetical suspect in an ambiguous experimental setting, the black suspects are typically shot in a higher percentage of the cases than an identically situated white suspect (see for example Correll et al. 2002; Correll et al. 2007; Correll 2009).
He cites US government (Bureau of Justice Statistics) data projecting that as of 2003, 5.9 percent of white boys born will serve time in prison as compared to 17.2 for Latinos and 32.2 percent for blacks
He cites a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study noting the rates at which young men reported having carried a gun in the past thirty days: 17.2 for blacks, 18.2 for whites, and 18.5 for Hispanics. But blacks were three times as likely to be arrested on weapons charges as compared to whites (Glaser 2015, 7).
Most notably, they note that the number of individuals imprisoned per 100,000 population was steady for many decades at about 100, but began a dramatic rise in the 1970s until it reached over 500 in the 2000s. Remarkably, this dramatic rise has not been correlated with a rise in either property or violent crime
Thus, the great paradox of a highly punitive approach to crime control is that it winds up criminalizing so much of daily life as to foster widespread illegality as people work to circumvent it. Intensive policing and the crime it intends to control become mutually reinforcing. The extent to which crime elicits harsh policing, or policing itself contributes to a climate of violence and illegality, becomes impossible to sort out. (Goffman, 2014, 201–202)
they are called upon to solve social problems but are equipped only with “handcuffs and jail time”
The State SBI office in charge takes its mandate of public dissemination very seriously and has been very cooperative. Because of the large amount of data the office provides, they have established an FTP (file transfer protocol) server allowing members of the public to log in directly to their servers to retrieve the data. The office is a model of transparency and open data.
Black drivers were significantly more likely: to have been stopped by the police in the past year; to be stopped by the local police; to have a higher number of prior lifetime stops per year of driving; and to travel rarely on the interstate highways. White drivers were more likely to: drive more miles per year; use the interstate; fail to wear a seatbelt; fail to signal when changing lanes; roll through stop signs; run yellow lights; and use more methods to avoid speeding tickets.
The SHP itself proves to have relatively low racial disparities compared to other agencies. This is reassuring as it accounts for approximately half of all traffic stops in the state.
Instances of violence following a traffic stop are rare. Officers encountered violence about 24,000 times, or just over once per 1,000 stops. Injuries are recorded in fewer than 10,000 stops total, more often to the driver than to the officer. While 10,000 injuries and 24,000 incidents with violence are certainly too many, given the scope of the data collection, with 20 million stops over fifteen years, it is clear that the vast majority of traffic stops are indeed routine.
If whites drive more than blacks or Hispanics, and we show with population comparisons that whites are less likely to be pulled over, then it means that whatever disparity we document using population numbers would be an under-, not an overestimate of the true degree of disparity.
Finally, the Stop Rate Ratio shows that blacks are 63 percent more likely to be pulled over than whites, and Hispanics are 2 percent more likely, or just marginally so.
First, police departments have much higher stop rates than sheriff’s departments, on average. Second, blacks have much higher stop rates than whites, across both types of agencies. Third, there is great variability in these statistics from agency to agency – for example, among sheriff’s departments, the mean black–white Stop Rate Ratio is 2.95, meaning that blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to be pulled over. However, the standard deviation is 1.93; this means there is tremendous range in outcomes from one agency-year to the next.
Among the included communities, Hispanic drivers appear to be over-policed in smaller communities, and under-policed in larger communities.
We saw in Table 3.1 that black drivers were 63 percent more likely to be pulled over than whites, based on population statistics. If blacks drive, on average, just 84 miles for every 100 miles that whites drive (e.g., based on the estimates in Table 3.3), then the driving-adjusted Stop Rate Ratio for blacks compared to whites would be: 1.63 / .84, or 1.94. For Hispanics, the 1.02 ratio of stop rates compared to whites, adjusted for driving, is 1.24.
For example, the State Highway Patrol rarely searches drivers, at a rate of 0.6 percent, whereas the search rates in Charlotte and Durham are about 7 to 8 percent, over ten times higher.
Following safety stops, black drivers are 49 percent more likely to be searched. But following stops for investigatory purposes, black drivers face a 170 percent increased chance of search, compared to whites.
following safety stops, Hispanic drivers are 20 percent more likely to be searched; and following investigatory stops, Hispanic drivers are 108 percent more likely to be searched.
This suggests that the racial disparities that we do find are perhaps driven less by outright racial animus on the part of police officers (because, in that case, why not ticket blacks at higher rates) than by implicit biases that lead officers to be more suspicious of black drivers. That is, most officers are not necessarily out to punish black drivers but they, perhaps unconsciously, have a lower threshold for stopping and searching African-Americans.
A Pew Research Center poll in 2014 found that 71 percent of whites have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence that the local police would treat blacks and whites equally, but just 36 percent of blacks agreed. Similar results were found in 2009 and 2007 (see Drake 2015).
Assuming that pounds most often refers to marijuana, officers have stopped someone with enough of the drug to qualify as a trafficker only a handful of times in hundreds of thousands of searches. If we assume that every kilo found is of marijuana, then officers have only caught sixteen marijuana traffickers.
Officers are 22 percent less likely to find contraband on black drivers following consent searches and 12 percent less likely after probable cause searches. On the other hand, searches that are incident to arrest and warrant searches are essentially race neutral and blacks are more likely to be found with contraband after protective frisks. This indicates that officers are either worse at making probable cause assessments as to whether black motorists have contraband or have a lower threshold for what qualifies as cause when interacting with a black driver. Either possibility suggests that
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Out of the almost 690,000 searches that took place, the basis for 146,003 was that an officer observed what they took to be contraband. However, it appears that officers are frequently mistaken in these observations. In fact, 47 percent of the time these searches fail to recover any contraband at all. When officers are correct and do find contraband only 22 percent of the time does it lead to an arrest. And again, we observe a racial difference: officers are mistaken in their observations 44 percent of the time when searching white motorists and 49 percent of the time when searching blacks.
Black drivers are searched at over twice the rate of white drivers, and have contraband in just 33 percent of these searches.
In 2002, officers were about 110 percent more likely to search a black driver with probable cause, by 2016 the difference skyrocketed to 250 percent.
Thus, following consent searches, blacks are 22 percent less likely to be found with contraband than are white drivers, Hispanics are 52 percent less likely, and other races 30 percent less likely. Women are 9 percent less likely to be found with contraband than men following consent searches, but 19 percent more likely to be found with contraband after searches with probable cause.
Moreover, because we are using agency- and officer-level fixed effects, the pattern we observe cannot be dismissed as the work of a few statistically aberrant “bad apples,” rather it appears to be a statewide phenomenon.
The State Highway Patrol searches about 0.6 percent of the drivers pulled over; in many other jurisdictions, that number is over 10 percent.
So enforcing the traffic laws inevitably means operating in a legal gray zone; when everyone is breaking the law, officers must decide for themselves whom to stop.
Instead each distribution reveals a wide range of officer behavior, with some officers citing fewer than 20 percent of the motorists they pull over and others citing 100 percent. Recall that we are looking only at officers with at least 100 stops, so the patterns that emerge are not the result of statistical flukes (for example, an officer that stopped only five people and ticketed them all).
An officer working an overnight shift might stop a lot of drunk drivers, who will be dealt with more harshly. On the other hand, an officer working speed control may be more inclined to be lenient, simply writing out a lot of tickets but only rarely searching and arresting motorists.
Speeders and those without seatbelts are more likely to get a ticket than those with DWI or safe movement stops. The graph does not indicate it, but this is because the DWI drivers are more likely to be arrested.
Although blacks are greatly outnumbered by whites in the population, they are stopped almost as often for investigatory purposes. When stops focus on traffic safety, they come closer to the population rates.
As the note to the figure indicates, following an investigatory stop an average of 0.28 whites are searched for every one black motorist; for safety stops the ratio is 0.80 to 1, but this still deviates greatly from the average stop rate.
These are broad patterns that emerge from our assessment of every officer across the state who has conducted a minimum of 100 traffic stops.
Officers who stop a greater proportion of black drivers are less inclined to search them disproportionately compared to white drivers. On the other hand, officers who stop mostly white drivers (to the left of the line indicating the 1.0 equality line for stops) are more inclined to search those blacks whom they do stop. Note that many individual officers (those at the extreme left of the graph) rarely seem to encounter any black drivers. But on average when they do they are more likely to search them (some are five times as likely).
If it is true that the traffic stops an officer makes reflect the racial make-up of the area in which they are patrolling, then it would seem that whites in a black area do not appear to raise the same suspicions as blacks in a white area.
