Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:41:27.632Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

At the intersection: Race, gender, and discretion in police traffic stop outcomes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2020

Kevin Roach Open the ORCID record for Kevin Roach [Opens in a new window] ,
Frank R. Baumgartner Open the ORCID record for Frank R. Baumgartner [Opens in a new window] ,
Leah Christiani Open the ORCID record for Leah Christiani [Opens in a new window] ,
Derek A. Epp Open the ORCID record for Derek A. Epp [Opens in a new window]  and
Kelsey Shoub Open the ORCID record for Kelsey Shoub [Opens in a new window]
Kevin Roach*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Frank R. Baumgartner
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Leah Christiani
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee
Derek A. Epp
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
Kelsey Shoub
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
*
*Corresponding author: Kevin Roach e-mail: kevroach@live.unc.edu
Get access

Abstract

Racial disparities in traffic stop outcomes are widespread and well documented. Less well understood is how racial disparities may be amplified or muted in different contexts. Here we focus on one such situational factor: whether the initial traffic stop was related to a traffic safety violation or a (broadly defined) investigatory purpose. This is a salient contextual characteristic as stop type relates to different levels of assumed discretion and purpose. While all traffic stops involve some officer discretion, investigatory stops are more easily used as justifications to conduct a search based on an officer's diffuse suspicion; traffic safety stops are more often just what they seem. Using millions of traffic stops from several states, we show that black male drivers are more likely to be searched and less likely to be found with contraband and that this relationship is amplified where the initial stop purpose is investigatory. One implication of this is that one path to alleviating disparities in traffic stops for agencies is emphasizing traffic safety, rather than using stops as a supplemental investigatory tool.

Keywords

Racial disparitiespolicingbig datadiscretion in policytraffic stops
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , July 2022 , pp. 239 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, KJ (2010) Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ayres, I (2002) Outcome Tests of Racial Disparities in Police Practices. Justice Research and Policy 4(1–2), 131–142. doi:10.3818/JRP.4.1.2002.131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baumgartner, FR, Bell, K, Beyer, L, Boldrin, T, Doyle, L, Govan, L, Halpert, J, Hicks, J, Kyriakoudes, K, Lee, C, Leger, M, McAdon, S, Michalak, S, Murphy, C, Neal, E, O'Malley, O, Payne, E, Sapirstein, A, Stanley, S and Thacker, K (2020) Intersectional Encounters: Representative Bureaucracy and the Routine Traffic Stop. Policy Studies Journal. doi: 10.1111/psj.12382.Google Scholar
Baumgartner, FR, Christiani, L, Epp, DA, Roach, K and Shoub, K (2017) Racial Disparities in Traffic Stop Outcomes. Duke Forum for Law and Social Change 9, 21–53.Google Scholar
Baumgartner, FR, Epp, DA and Shoub, K (2018) Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baumgartner, FR, Epp, DA, Shoub, K and Love, B (2017) Targeting Young Men of Color for Search and Arrest During Traffic Stops: Evidence From North Carolina, 2002–2013. Politics, Groups, and Identities 5 (1), 107–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, GS (1957) The Economics of Discrimination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Becker, GS (1993) Nobel Lecture: The Economic way of Looking at Behavior. Journal of Political Economy 101, 385–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burch, T (2013) Trading Democracy for Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christiani, L (2020) Intersectional Stereotyping in Policing: An Analysis Of Traffic Stop Outcomes. Politics, Groups, and Identities. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2020.1748064.Google Scholar
Correll, J, Park, B, Judd, CM and Wittenbrink, B (2002) The Police Officer's Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (6), 1314–1329.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dollar, CB (2014) Racial Threat Theory: Assessing the Evidence, Requesting Redesign. Journal of Criminology 2014, 1–7. doi: https://doi-org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.1155/2014/983026.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eberhardt, Jennifer (2019) Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. Penguin BooksGoogle Scholar
Eberhardt, JL, Goff, PA, Purdie, VJ and Davies, PG (2004) Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (6), 876–893.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eckhouse, L (2019) Race, Party, and Representation in Criminal Justice Politics. Journal of Politics 81 (3), 1143–1152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Editorial Board. (1999) Who's being stopped? Raleigh News and Observer. February 19.Google Scholar
Epp, CR, Maynard-Moody, S and Haider-Markel, D (2014) Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fagan, J and Davies, G (2000) Street Stops and Broken Windows: Terry, Race, and Disorder in New York City. Fordham Urban Law Journal 28, 457–504.Google Scholar
Fagan, J and Geller, A (2015) Following the Script: Narratives of Suspicion in Terry Stops in Street Policing. University of Chicago Law Review 82, 51.Google Scholar
Gelman, A, Fagan, J and Kiss, A (2007) An Analysis of the New York City Police Department's “Stop-and-Frisk” Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias. Journal of the American Statistical Association 102 (479), 813–823.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, JL and Nelson, MJ (2018) Blacks and Blue: How and why African Americans Judge the American Legal System. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glaser, J (2014) Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glaser, J, Spencer, K and Charbonneau, A (2014) Racial Bias and Public Policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1), 88–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goel, S, Rao, J and Shroff, R (2016) precinct or Prejudice? Understanding Racial Disparities in New York City's Stop-and-Frisk Policy. Annals of Applied Statistics 10(1), 365–394. doi:10.1214/15-AOAS897.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harcourt, B (2003) "The Shaping of Chance: Actuarial Models and Criminal Profiling at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" The University of. Chicago Law Review 70, 105–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, RD and Wheelock, D (2007) Group Threat and Social Control: Race, Perceptions of Minorities and the Desire to Punish. Social Forces 85 (3), 1255–1280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knowles, J, Persico, N and Todd, P (2001) Racial Bias in Motor Vehicle Searches: Theory and Evidence. Journal of Political Economy 109(1), 203–229. doi:10.1086/318603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerman, AE and Weaver, VM (2014) Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthew Petrocelli, M, Piquero, AR and Smith, MR (2003) Conflict Theory and Racial Profiling: An Empirical Analysis of Police Traffic Stop Data. Journal of Criminal Justice 31 (1), 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondak, JJ, Hurwitz, J, Peffley, M and Testa, P (2017) The Vicarious Bases of Perceived Injustice. American Journal of Political Science 61 (4), 804–819.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, NM (2015) The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mummolo, J, (2018a) Militarization Fails to Enhance Police Safety or Reduce Crime but may Harm Police Reputation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(37), 9181–9186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mummolo, J, (2018b) Modern Police Tactics, Police-Citizen Interactions, and the Prospects for Reform. The Journal of Politics 80(1), 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, BK (2001) Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving A Weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2), 181–192.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Payne, BK (2006) Split-Second Decisions and Unintended Stereotyping. Current Directions in Psychological Science 15 (6), 287–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peffley, M and Hurwitz, J (2010) Justice in America: The Separate Realities of Blacks and Whites. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierson, E, Simoiu, C, Overgoor, J, Corbett-Davies, S, Ramachandran, V, Phillips, C and Goel, S (2017) A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States. Working paper, available online: https://5harad.com/papers/traffic-stops.pdf.Google Scholar
Remsberg, C (1995) Tactics for Criminal Patrol: Vehicle Stops, Drug Discovery and Officer Survival. Calibre Press.Google Scholar
Sagar, HA and Schofield, JW (1980) Racial and Behavioral Cues in Black and White Children's Perceptions of Ambiguously Aggressive Acts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (4), 590–598.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, DA (1986) The Neighborhood Context of Police Behavior. Crime and justice 8, 313–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theobald, NA and Haider-Markel, DP (2009) Race, Bureaucracy, and Symbolic Representation: Interactions Between Citizens and Police. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 19 (2), 409–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tillyer, R and Engel, RS (2013) The Impact of Drivers’ Race, Gender, and Age During Traffic Stops: Assessing Interaction Terms and the Social Conditioning Model. Crime & Delinquency 59 (3), 369–395.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tillyer, R, Klahm, CF IV and Engel, RS (2012) The Discretion to Search: A Multilevel Examination of Driver Demographics and Officer Characteristics. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 28 (2), 184–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todd, AR, Thiem, KC and Neel, R (2016). Does Seeing Faces of Young Black Boys Facilitate the Identification of Threatening Stimuli?” Psychological Science 27 (3), 384–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615624492.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomaskovic-Devey, D, Mason, M and Zingraff, M (2004) Looking for the Driving While Black Phenomena: Conceptualizing Racial Bias Processes and Their Associated Distributions. Police Quarterly 7, 3–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, TR and Jackson, J (2014) Popular Legitimacy and the Exercise of Legal Authority: Motivating Compliance, Cooperation, and Engagement. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 20 (1), 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, TR, Jackson, J and Mentovich, A (2015) The Consequences of Being an Object of Suspicion: Potential Pitfalls of Proactive Police Contact. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 12 (4), 602–636.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitale, AS (2018) The End of Policing. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Voigt, R, Camp, NP, Prabhakaran, V, Hamilton, WL, Hetey, RC, Griffiths, CM, Jurgens, D, Jurafsky, D and Eberhardt, JL (2017) Language From Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) 114, 6521–6526. doi: www.pnas.org/cgi/.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Walker, HL (2014) Extending the Effects of the Carceral State: Proximal Contact, Political Participation, and Race. Political Research Quarterly 67 (4), 809–822.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, VM and Lerman, AE (2010) Political Consequences of the Carceral State. American Political Science Review 104 (4), 817–833.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webb, Gary (2007) Driving While Black: Tracking Unspoken Law-Enforcement Racism. Esquire (new York, N Y ) 131, 118–127. doi: www.esquire.com/news-politics/a1223/driving-while-black-0499.Google Scholar
Weitzer, R and Tuch, SA (2006) Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, A (2019) Family Matters? Voting Behavior in Households with Criminal Justice Contact. American Political Science Review 113 (2), 607–661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Roach et al. supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Roach et al. supplementary material(File)
File 43.6 KB