Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

by Frank R. Baumgartner

Occasionally, the courts have issued strong sanctions against clearly documented racial profiling. Typically, however, this has been when a powerful or wealthy individual happens to be caught in the net.

Scott, in contrast to many who may have been stopped in this rural 10-mile stretch of I-85 where the Banks County Sheriff has jurisdiction, had an NBA salary of $3.3 million in 2015 when the stop occurred. He hired a team of lawyers who documented that the deputy involved had twice been forced to resign previous law enforcement jobs, and, as a member of the “crime interdiction unit” had made over 1,400 traffic stops during 2015 and 2016, but had issued only eight tickets. Of the forty-seven arrests he had made, forty-four were minority drivers.

While the Deputy issued almost no speeding tickets, and did not even use a radar gun to identify speeders, his agency spent over a quarter million dollars in fiscal year 2016 in forfeiture funds. These funds paid for equipment, training, travel, and capital improvements (Rankin 2017).

In their report on Ferguson, the US DOJ writes, “the confluence of policing to raise revenue and racial bias thus has resulted in practices that not only violate the Constitution and cause direct harm to the individuals whose rights are violated, but also undermine community trust, especially among many African Americans” (2015, 6).

Noting that President Nixon had declared both a war on crime and a war on cancer, he remarks not only that the war on crime seems to have had much greater effects in many areas of politics, education, and criminal justice than the war on cancer, but he notes in his conclusion: “To mix metaphors, governing through crime produces cancer, or more accurately, cancers” (278). His example: 2 million prisoners, with large numbers returning to devastated communities each year, often with little prospect for further education, employment, or productive lives.

For middle-age white men, the likelihood of being searched after a stop was around 3 percent; for young black men the likelihood was about 10 percent.)

From 20 million traffic stops, 2.4 percent lead to a search. Of those, just 33 percent led to contraband (0.8 percent of stops), and just 12 percent of the searches led to a contraband-arrest combination (0.29 percent of stops). That is, 99.7 percent of traffic stops fail to generate a drug or contraband arrest. The “sheer numbers game” the California trooper describes is a bad gamble.

Our analysis suggests that ratcheting up the use of traffic stops as a crime fighting strategy has little positive effect on crime but dramatically negative effects on racial disparities, on alienation and trust in the minority community, and on community cooperation with the police.

Clear empirical evidence suggests that use of the reform reduces compliance with the officer’s request (or reduces those requests) by over 90 percent. This, if nothing else, suggests that citizens feel compelled to agree to an officer’s verbal request for consent. That by itself should suggest a constitutional argument for reducing the use of such searches, as the “consent” may be more theoretical than practical.

One can imagine that with minimal investment the NC DOJ could routinely issue data-driven reports to police agencies, highlighting statistics of interest such as arrest, search, and contraband hit rates, all broken down by race, gender, and age group.

In municipalities where African-Americans have more political leverage, we found that racial disparities in stops were less severe on average.

This takes place at the individual level as it affects citizens’ orientation toward government, as intense police scrutiny may alienate people, making them less inclined to participate in politics, as we have reviewed. It also can occur through legal and institutional means. For example, many states prevent citizens with felony convictions from voting. In a number of US states that means as many as 25 percent of black men are barred from the voting booth; a practice Alexander (2010) refers to as “the new Jim Crow.”

In 2013, NC Governor Pat McCrory signed what was then one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws, which required that citizens show a government-issued ID to vote, cut down on the number of early voting days, eliminated same-day voter registration, and eliminated pre-voter registration for teenagers.

The law sparked immediate controversy and was quickly challenged in the courts, culminating in 2016 when a federal court ruled that the law was unconstitutional. The justices were swayed in large part by evidence that NC lawmakers had, while drafting the legislation, requested information on racial differences in voting behavior and then outlawed the types of IDs more commonly used by black citizens. Similarly, after learning that African-Americans were more likely to vote during the first seven days of early voting, lawmakers eliminated those days.