More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 17 - August 24, 2020
Overall, 37 percent of the officers in the safety stops figure fall outside of the 2:1 bounds: 30 percent below the lower bound (searching more blacks), and 7 percent above the upper bound (searching more whites than blacks). For the investigatory stops, 33 percent fall outside of the 2:1 bounds, 30 percent below, and 3 percent above. That is a lot of bad apples!
the typical officer searches 0.60 and 0.73 percent of white drivers for every one percent of black drivers they search, for safety and investigatory stops, respectively.
In other words, there is a general pattern of 30 to 40 percent difference, and in addition to this, there are bad apples, at least insofar as we have defined them.
It is hard to call one-third of the total a set of “bad apples.” Rather, these are officers who fall not very far from the norms which are enforced and encouraged throughout their agencies.
For safety stops, forty-three out of 255 agencies are twice as likely to search black drivers, ten are twice as likely to search whites. Investigatory stops show a similar pattern. So, once again, we seem to have a great many bad apples. For safety stops, 17 percent of agencies search blacks twice as often as they search white motorists; for investigatory stops, 16 percent of agencies are at least twice as likely to search black drivers. Comparably, only 4 and 2 percent of agencies search whites twice as often.
Perhaps the most flagrant example of this is a statutory requirement passed by Congress in 2009 that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintain a mandatory minimum of at least 34,000 detention beds on a daily basis. That is, ICE is required to keep at least 34,000 suspected illegal immigrants behind bars at all times.
While the police are typically not involved in immigration issues, which are a federal function, there has been pressure for states and local police agencies to cooperate with ICE, in particular since the 1996 passage of the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IRIRA). This law enabled local police departments to enter into Memoranda of Agreement (MOA) with the federal government to enforce national immigration policies, under section 287(g). Agencies with these 287(g) agreements may turn over suspected illegal aliens to federal officials.
At one end of the scale is Arizona, which generated headlines (and lawsuits) in 2010 when the legislature passed the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (S.B. 1070), requiring police officers to attempt to determine motorists’ immigration status following a traffic stop. Critics argued that this provision of the law was tantamount to legalizing racial profiling, as the police would undoubtedly be more likely to suspect Hispanic motorists of being illegal immigrants (Lach 2012). But, in Arizona v. United States (2012), the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that the “papers
...more
There is a robust relationship between economic hardship and harsh attitudes toward recent immigrants (Jaret 1999; Chavez 2008).
Johnson (2004, 7) reminds us that “the vast majority of today’s immigrants to the United States – as many as 80 to 90 percent each year – are people of color.
a national survey conducted shortly after the 2012 Arizona ruling found that 79 percent of Hispanic voters thought that SB 1070 would make it more likely that legally present Hispanics would be stopped by police (Kelley, Fitz, and Wolgin 2012). The same survey showed that 68 percent of Hispanics thought the law would make it less likely for immigrants to report a crime or volunteer information to the police.
When it comes to contraband, discretionary searches of Hispanics are woefully less productive; officers are almost 50 percent less likely to find contraband on Hispanic than white drivers after consent searches.
Nguyen and Gill (2015) report anecdotal evidence of police checkpoints appearing in areas frequented by Hispanic drivers (such as outside Spanish-speaking church congregations) after the adoption of 287(g) programs that encouraged local law enforcement to crack down on illegal immigration with the backing of federal authorities.
Disparities are particularly pronounced for searches that take place during an arrest and it appears that officers are more inclined to feel that a protective frisk is necessary to safely engage with Hispanic drivers. When it comes to discretionary search types, Hispanics are about 47 percent more likely to be searched with probable cause than white drivers and 81 percent more likely to be searched with consent.
Hispanic drivers are subjected to consent searches 81 percent more often than white drivers (from Table 7.3), but these searches yield contraband only half as often (Table 7.4).
Of the 830 officers that we include in the analysis, 417 are at least twice as likely to search Hispanics. In other words, the majority of officers with sufficient stops and searches of Hispanics to ensure statistical robustness are searching Hispanics at a dramatically higher rate as compared to white drivers.
Large municipalities feature many differences from small towns, including in the structure of their police departments (e.g., their institutionalization and bureaucratic structure), the ability of political leaders to respond to local neighborhood concerns, and sheer physical scope, making policing considerably more complex, and potentially more geographically distinct, in larger cities as compared to small towns.
Sheriff’s departments have lower search rates on average than police agencies (see Baumgartner, Christiani et al. 2017), possibly reflecting their direct election status.
Among county sheriff’s departments that meet our threshold for analysis, black drivers are on average 53 percent more likely to be searched and 13 percent more likely to be arrested; they are, on average, about equally likely to see a light outcome or receive a ticket. In each case, these are lower disparities on average than among the municipalities.
As political power of the black community increases, the disparities decrease for searches and light outcomes and increase for citations: they converge towards equality in each case. These results are statistically significant at the 0.05 level for both light outcomes and citations, and at the 0.10 level for searches.
Party of sheriff is not statistically significant in any regression, and appears to have a negligible substantive effect.
Police-initiated contact with citizens, especially young men, can be highly alienating if the officer’s actions cause the citizen to believe that they are a suspect. To be a suspect after participating in a crime is one thing; to realize one appears suspicious to the authorities for no particular reason other than appearance, or place of residence, is quite another.
In fact, the few surveys that have targeted police officers suggest that they dislike working in communities that distrust them (Morin et al. 2017).
We show that if agencies focus on traffic safety, rather than using traffic stops as a supplemental investigatory tool, then racial disparities in outcome ratios trend toward equality.
Finally, we assess an important concern with these possible reforms: would less aggressive policing increase violence or crime? Through an analysis of the city which implemented the most dramatic shift in its policing practices, Fayetteville, we show not only that crime continued its long decline during the period of reform, but that, adjusting for the crime rate, citizen calls for service actually increased as the reforms took hold. Thus, community cooperation with the police was enhanced, leading to safer and better outcomes for all.
That is, where decision-makers have more discretion, implicit biases have more room to come into play; where decision-makers are constrained to follow clear rules, bias is reduced.
seventeen states do not allow a seatbelt violation to be a primary reason for a traffic stop.
So, simply by eliminating certain types of stops (stops that are not permissible in many other states) racial disparities are substantially less pronounced. Most notably, the arrest and search outcomes are reduced by about 20 percent, a substantial movement toward equality of treatment.
Going from the regressions that include all possible stops to those including only safety stops, the odds-ratios associated with black drivers decrease for the search and arrest regressions. In fact, for arrest, the 43 percent disparity almost completely disappears. For searches, it is reduced from a 94 percent increased likelihood to 73 percent.
As we will see in the section below, demanding a signature on a form that informs the citizen of their right to withhold consent to be searched typically reduces the number of consent searches by well over 75 percent.
While this is of course part of every American’s freedom to be free from “unreasonable search and seizure” under the Fourth Amendment, in the power relationship of an officer interviewing a citizen, the vast majority of individuals will give consent when asked. And if not, and the officer says they gave consent, then in court the matter will be addressed by the word of the officer versus the word of the suspected criminal.
The head of the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association declared he would ask for a federal investigation “into what he described as a conspiracy to undermine the Fayetteville Police Department,” further elaborating that he thought the city was “awash in crime, calling it a ‘cesspool of corruption and anti-police hatred’” (Leskanic 2012).
With police leaders suggesting in public that officers can substitute probable cause when they cannot get consent to do a search, it is clear that the administrative culture in the Durham Police Department was not enthusiastic in responding to the community and city council pressure to revise procedures.
Finally, while Chapel Hill may be a neighbor to Durham, the implementation of the mandatory use of the written consent form could not have been more different. Through conversations with community groups and community members, the police department voluntarily decided to begin changing how they police the city.
It might be easy to conclude that the Durham situation is all too common, that a reform imposed by the community on a reluctant police leadership may prove ineffectual, especially if a city is suffering from significant crime, making the police feel they can give up no tools or discretion.However, Fayetteville presents the opposite story: there, community–police relations were perhaps even at a lower point than in Durham; in any case they were at a breaking point, as noted by the city manager resigning and accusing city councilmen and others of “throwing the police under the bus” and a
...more
With one simple (but highly publicized) change in police practices, we see a statistically significant difference in how the citizenry interacts with the local police.
The UCR uses arrests as a proxy for crime rates, so any concern that the written consent policy would lead to more crime, either by empowering criminals or obstructing the police, appear unfounded.
The bill was passed, expanded in 2001, and soon data was pouring into the NC DOJ. However, no state-mandated efforts to analyze the data were ever conducted. This was more than just a lost opportunity; it was, in fact, a violation of the law. The law mandated that the Attorney General’s office make a report to the General Assembly every two years about the data. The question then about racial disparities in traffic stops went unanswered.
No official analysis was ever conducted, and none has been conducted to this date. The state has never concluded that there is a problem on the highways. Nor, of course, has it certified that there is not.
In 1999, the possibility that blacks were twice as likely to be searched by the Highway Patrol prompted lawmakers to seek answers. Today, after eighteen years of data collection have assembled over 20 million observations, we can report that a two-to-one disparity, far from being an aberration, is in fact the statewide average; many police agencies are much more disparate in their treatment of black motorists.
Ironically, given that the Highway Patrol was singled out in the original legislation, that agency actually has much lower search rates and racial disparities than average. The 2001 expansion of the law to the vast majority of police agencies throughout the state revealed much greater disparities than within the SHP.
When we look at the behaviors associated with each police officer, we find no correlation between a propensity to search and the propensity to find contraband, suggesting that there are no overarching standards, that training does not produce a clear profile of when to search, and that it may well be an idiosyncratic guessing game, with each officer using his or her own judgment.
In Texas, state troopers have recorded millions of highway patrol stops and statistics reveal large racial disparities in search rates (see Baumgartner et al. 2016; Schwartz and Dexheimer 2017), but never has a complaint about racial profiling been confirmed by the Department of Public Safety.
In fact, the agency has rejected every allegation of racial profiling that it has ever received.
if Chief Moore suggests that his own dangerous encounter was understandable because he was “a black man with a gun” then it suggests that many police agencies do not share the same concerns about eliminating profiling incidents when confronted with them.
With the investigations being conducted by internal affairs departments loath to find evidence of profiling, it is not surprising that documented cases are rare. Durham is in fact one of the few cases where the city government has officially concluded that there was racial bias within the police department. This finding came from the Human Relations Commission, not an internal DPD investigation,
Three men named Gomez, Pena, and Dela Cruz were travelling from Georgia to New York when deputies from the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office Interstate Criminal Enforcement (ICE) Division pulled them over for speeding. Officers found six pounds of cocaine, so in this case they had truly “found their prince.” However, Judge Nathaniel J. Poovey ruled that charges would have to be dropped, ruling that the search was conducted without consent or probable cause, that the deputies had committed racial profiling, and by turning off audio recording equipment had destroyed evidence. He described their
...more
Most likely, more will follow as defense attorneys and public defenders become more accustomed to using the data associated with an individual officer through such websites as https://opendatapolicing.com/nc/, administered by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, but making use of the same data we have used throughout this book. These data resources allow an attorney to look up the records of the officer involved in their client’s case to investigate possible patterns of disparate behavior toward drivers of different races. If found, and particularly if combined with evidence that consent
...more
There is little that the police can do to improve local economic opportunities, or the quality of public schools, or the availability of inexpensive public transportation. Nevertheless, the police are widely viewed as the solution to crime, so when crime becomes more prevalent, the burden of doing something about it falls to the men and women in blue.
No one wants to live in a police state, so how was this new approach to crime fighting ever viable? The answer is that it was extremely targeted. Middle-class whites were simply not affected by it and continued to enjoy a less invasive, community-oriented style of policing.
